Back in 2010, during the early days of bwapi, there was a Brood War AI tournament held by the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. It's interesting to see how different the approaches were back then, vs this or Deepmind's SC2 work.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091124210529/http://eis.ucsc.e...

There's a great contemporary Ars Technica piece by a competitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

As an undergrad I did a project using genetic programming. It was not very successful, but it was a lot of fun.

https://tomisin.space/archive/starcraft-genetic-programming/

I don't know where else to write this, but I want to throw the idea out there. I have long wanted to take old broodwar televised matches, many of which are terrible quality 240p, and use machine learning to convert them to into perfect Broodwar Remastered frames. This seems tractable to me because you should be able to map the terrain sets to their remastered equivalents, and the game is just a series of sprites rendered at specific frames. Even if the source quality is terrible, I imagine this is able to be extracted at high quality since you can, eg, set up an automated pipeline which generates training data. Maps from original graphics to remastered, and then again for 240p -> tilemap positions for frame camera center + sprite positions / animation index.

Unrelated to the benchmark...

I love StarCraft. I started playing it right from the beginning, most of my friends right now are from that era. I literally met people that have spread to almost every continent when I was in my early teens. We played at internet cafes and did not have access to the internet, that was priced differently...

I miss those days so much.

Everybody was from a different background back then, and nobody was anything other than a guy that plays StaCraft at the cybercafe... And now, we are in our 40's and I know Math teachers, history teachers, oil rig operators, software programmers, professional gamers, lawyers and more... hahah So crazy to think about it... and I know them, we talk, what a world.

There is currently a bot beating everyone on the ladder. Just watched it today on Artosiscasts yt channel.

I love this. Funnily enough StarCraft has influenced how I approach AI at a meta level

Protoss: powerful and expensive frontier coding agents you directly micromanage for the toughest tasks

Terran: versatile team comps of dedicated agent roles you can delegate well-defined tasks to

Zerg: massive swarms of specialist custom agents inside your apps that you evolve and optimise for speed and cost

Knowing every faction has its strengths and weaknesses helps me decide which tools to use for the job.