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.

A friend of mine created GoBench[1][2] that evaluates LLMs on 9×9 Go using KataGo opponents as Elo anchors, you see real capability differences there, like Astra Max substantially leading all other models. I think strategy is a generally interesting area to evaluate LLMs on

[1] https://rolandgao.com/blog/gobench/

[2] https://rolandgao.com/gobench.pdf

If you want to see human written bots in action or compete in the bot ladder yourself, try https://aiarena.net/

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

Did it play by looking at screenshots and sending clicks, or was there other mediation/symbolization?

It sounds like it might have been actually played in real time, which would be very important to distinguish.

I have recently seen other harnesses letting agents play real-time games in what seems like discrete time slices, turning eg Portal into something turn-based https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruuGXFAmiOE

Any details about the harness the agents were given? I am curious what representation of the screen and world state was provided to the agents and what tools they had available.

Somewhat related: In 2018, Google DeepMind had already created AIs that were capable of beating professional gamers in StarCraft 2 (the sequel to Brood War): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs

Would be interesting if you could team a fast and slow agent together -- slow model can either act directly or maybe just communicate to the fast model.

This is a great idea for a benchmark. Something all the benchmarks seem to be missing is strategy, tactical solutions in most of the benchmarks are all thats required but here requires actual long term thinking and tactical thinking, balancing and orchestration.

A ton of conversations about the game must be in the training set. I wonder, is there any way just from watching how they play, of telling if they tend to pick strategies that people complain or meme about online?

+ Playable Agent driven Starcraft