TL;DR: There's a new strong Brood War bot created through Reinforcement Learning. Somebody stole and hacked it to run on the official Remastered ladder. This hasn't been done or condoned by anyone in the BW AI community.
The big news this year was the entry of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) bot, Pluto, which is basically a BW bot that works in a similar way as AlphaStar was for SC2. It learned to play the game through pure self play and hit a level far beyond what any of us had been able to accomplish before. If you're interested in learning more about how it works, check out the readme and the bot's GitHub page.
Since this bot is way better than any bots we've seen before, we have been thinking about how to get it in a state where it is easy for humans to play against. This is a non-trivial task, since BWAPI only works on the pre-Remastered 1.16.1 version, but with the help of modern AI coding models it is much more easily achieved now than it used to be. The author was able to get it running in Remastered to play some private games against humans, and we've been trying to come up with some way to distribute this so people can try it without allowing access to the ladder.
Unfortunately someone outside our community has beat us to the punch, having hacked the bot to be able to run in Remastered themselves, and are actively playing games on the ladder. What makes matters worse is that they've apparently also enabled a maphack (which incidentally has probably made the bot play worse; BW bots always play with fog of war enabled, so it gets very confused seeing units it doesn't expect to be able to see from its training).
The player is going by the name of who (^333^). At the time of writing they have made it to #5 on the global ladder and have played games against several pros.
We've reported the player through some Blizzard site, but it's probably a long shot anyone actually takes action on it. On the off chance that someone reading this has contacts with Blizzard, we would appreciate it getting on their radar. We also have no connection to the Korean BW community, so if anyone can get the word out there it would also be appreciated.
The BW AI community is just a small group of hobbyists who love the game and programming stupid bots to play it, so having something like this potentially cast us in a bad light is quite distressing.
If anyone is interested in playing against other bots, they can check out SCHNAIL. Pluto is not there yet though as it is a bit more difficult to run.
I found Paralyze's stream after I posted this and gave them some info about it.
Interestingly, internally Pluto runs on 240 APM (its model does a single action every 6 frames, where an action could be selecting a bunch of units). However, between its model and the game, the actual commands get split off into separate commands for each unit, so the APM looks higher. So as an example, on frame 6 it'll select all its workers, then on frame 12 it'll command them to move towards the minerals, but what is actually sent to the game engine is four move commands (one for each worker).
The really sad thing is that the hacker added a maphack, so there's no legitimacy to any of the games it is playing right now
On September 18 2026 22:02 iFU.pauline wrote: It would be interesting to limit the bot with 300 apm and see if it can teach us something useful about the game.
This sentiment has been shared in just about every AI thread on this site over the past 10+ years and the response was "first we have to make it good enough to beat [high-level] human players, only after that can we think about making it more human-like."
Well, it seems like we're basically there now.
A few things to consider, though, based on my experience with BW AI and the answers I got to similar questions in the past:
1. Even if you cap it at, say, 410 average APM over ~10 minutes with 818 peak (IIRC this was the highest average APM in a KeSPA match, at least from the games where they published APMs), it will still not have the constraints that humans have. They can still "look" at the entire map at once and control armies on two fronts without "looking" at either one. There is no "screen," there is no "mouse," there is no "mapscrolling" or hotkeys. Implementing all of these will definitely make it much, much weaker at least at first IMO, and somehow I doubt that this is a major priority for developers who are currently more focused on making the strongest possible AI. I guess my point is that even just capping the APM is not enough to make the AI play the game in any way a human would or even could.
2. AIs I've seen up to this point already have a lot of what I would consider to be "over-movement", or at least marginally beneficial. What often happens when two ranged armies collide is they initiate this dance where each unit pushes up and shoots then retreats, or retreats if it gets too far, etc. Now, this may be optimal (and is also humanly impossible), and it does help win fights against 1a2a3a ship it and forget it. However, I don't think that that in particular is necessary for a top level AI to perform well. Toning down this behavior by 80% will remove thousands of APM from its peak. So, I think that achieving human-like APM in a vacuum without losing too much performance is not too unimaginable. Furthermore and AFAIK, AIs don't scout bases with stuff like patrol, because why would they? They can just send more attack move commands. However, if forced to optimize, this could be implemented I imagine. In summary of this point, I think there are already a lot of potential APM-based optimizations that (to my admittedly limited understanding) are easily accessible. However, even then, I'm sure that the AI will be doing things beyond human capabilities, even with the restraints mentioned in #1. They will still hypothetically have frame-perfect Shuttle pick-up and drop Reaver, for example.
TL;DR I don't think there will be as many humanly accessible take-aways from APM-capped AI play in a vacuum outside of maybe "strategic" stuff like build orders and optimizations but even that I am dubious on because we already have diehard nerds in the community obsessively optimizing builds and etc.
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@OP This is all very interesting and comes at an interesting time in the current news cycle as more and more doomsday predictions about AI are coming out. Has anyone in the community made a YT video about this or anything, is there some organized community statement besides this one in the works? Because if not, I wouldn't mind diving back into the SSCAIT server to put something together, if there is interest.
Thank you for the offer and nice to hear from you!
Bruce's post accurately reflects the facts and the community's sentiments. I endorse it. He has cross-posted it to Reddit and fmkorea.
Pluto is genuinely a big step up from any bots we've had before and it's sad that this is how it's being discovered. If you want to cast some games against it come stop by the SSCAIT Discord.
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Also if anyone from Blizzard is reading: I have created a bot detector that identifies botting players from replays with 100% accuracy (on the ~160,000 replays I have tested it on).
Very happy to share it with a free license or otherwise assist with preventing ladder abuse. I'm not posting it publicly to prevent ladder cheaters from figuring out how to beat it.
On September 18 2026 22:46 PurpleWave wrote: Thank you for the offer and nice to hear from you!
Bruce's post accurately reflects the facts and the community's sentiments. I endorse it. He has cross-posted it to Reddit and fmkorea.
Pluto is genuinely a big step up from any bots we've had before and it's sad that this is how it's being discovered. If you want to cast some games against it come stop by the SSCAIT Discord.
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Also if anyone from Blizzard is reading: I have created a bot detector that identifies botting players from replays with 100% accuracy (on the ~160,000 replays I have tested it on).
Very happy to share it with a free license or otherwise assist with preventing ladder abuse. I'm not posting it publicly to prevent ladder cheaters from figuring out how to beat it.
Wonderful to hear from you too, PurpleWave, and fantastic initiative to make a bot detector 🙂 Let's see if Blizzard cares.
Of course, I wasn't doubting that bmneilsen is telling the truth and is credible; I probably worded my question incorrectly. I guess I was trying to go more in the direction of "do y'all have any plans to put out a video about this and bring more attention to it?" (at a time when such topics are getting a lot of traction) because I wouldn't want to step on any toes and you guys are definitely far more qualified to do so from a technical standpoint. I also wouldn't want to be a headline chaser and take attention away from, say, the main SSCAIT channel or the channel of whoever would be a "primary investigator" or whatnot.
We don't really have any public-facing channels these days. so I don't think there's any risk of stepping on anyone's toes.
My hope had been that Pluto's author could make a splash announcing this, given that it is quite a large achievement. But now that the cat is out of the bag, I felt like we couldn't really just ignore it, so I made this post as a kind of PSA.
I do hope we can get a version suitable for offline play in Remastered available at some point in the near future so people interested in it can choose to play.
on the game where it loses to a barcode zerg on odyssey, game length 22:55, the bot/user types in the chat to the opponent at the end of the game in korean... idk if that info is useful in any way but maybe it gives a hint to who stole pluto
On September 18 2026 22:02 iFU.pauline wrote: It would be interesting to limit the bot with 300 apm and see if it can teach us something useful about the game.
This sentiment has been shared in just about every AI thread on this site over the past 10+ years and the response was "first we have to make it good enough to beat [high-level] human players, only after that can we think about making it more human-like."
Well, it seems like we're basically there now.
A few things to consider, though, based on my experience with BW AI and the answers I got to similar questions in the past:
1. Even if you cap it at, say, 410 average APM over ~10 minutes with 818 peak (IIRC this was the highest average APM in a KeSPA match, at least from the games where they published APMs), it will still not have the constraints that humans have. They can still "look" at the entire map at once and control armies on two fronts without "looking" at either one. There is no "screen," there is no "mouse," there is no "mapscrolling" or hotkeys. Implementing all of these will definitely make it much, much weaker at least at first IMO, and somehow I doubt that this is a major priority for developers who are currently more focused on making the strongest possible AI. I guess my point is that even just capping the APM is not enough to make the AI play the game in any way a human would or even could.
2. AIs I've seen up to this point already have a lot of what I would consider to be "over-movement", or at least marginally beneficial. What often happens when two ranged armies collide is they initiate this dance where each unit pushes up and shoots then retreats, or retreats if it gets too far, etc. Now, this may be optimal (and is also humanly impossible), and it does help win fights against 1a2a3a ship it and forget it. However, I don't think that that in particular is necessary for a top level AI to perform well. Toning down this behavior by 80% will remove thousands of APM from its peak. So, I think that achieving human-like APM in a vacuum without losing too much performance is not too unimaginable. Furthermore and AFAIK, AIs don't scout bases with stuff like patrol, because why would they? They can just send more attack move commands. However, if forced to optimize, this could be implemented I imagine. In summary of this point, I think there are already a lot of potential APM-based optimizations that (to my admittedly limited understanding) are easily accessible. However, even then, I'm sure that the AI will be doing things beyond human capabilities, even with the restraints mentioned in #1. They will still hypothetically have frame-perfect Shuttle pick-up and drop Reaver, for example.
TL;DR I don't think there will be as many humanly accessible take-aways from APM-capped AI play in a vacuum outside of maybe "strategic" stuff like build orders and optimizations but even that I am dubious on because we already have diehard nerds in the community obsessively optimizing builds and etc.
---
@OP This is all very interesting and comes at an interesting time in the current news cycle as more and more doomsday predictions about AI are coming out. Has anyone in the community made a YT video about this or anything, is there some organized community statement besides this one in the works? Because if not, I wouldn't mind diving back into the SSCAIT server to put something together, if there is interest.
That's right, it has a 98 % winrate. The suggestion becomes now valid. What I would do basically is to add constraints step by step and see how the AI figures out its win which isn't sheer brute-force. Because all I saw so far is something using nuclear weapon vs something using a sword. Also, the human player shall know he is dealing with AI because hacking an AI requires different approaches than hacking a human. It's highly plausible that you can't use the same strat to defeat an AI than a human, and I would argue that it also works the other way around.
The ultimate test would be to have someone becoming world champion while just training vs AI. We might hit a big wall here.
It's fascinating to watch the replays of ^333^ vs korean pros. Against Larva he went 6rax m&m only, no ebay or turrets or +weapon or +armor upgrades at all. He just kind of out-zoned and surrounded the mutalisks and killed them and then counter attacked.
Against Iris he went cloaked wraiths into siege tanks + m&m, he brought a few scvs for repairs and soak up initial tank shots etc. I might be wrong but it looked like he blocked Iris scouting barracks from landing when his wraiths was attacking it. He did not get any armory upgrades here neither. It seems he doesn't value upgrades very highly.
When he's about to win he starts upgrading medic restoration for some reason.
If there would be AI opponent that were more human-like and you could set the skill level, play style and build orders etc it would be amazing as a practice partner.
On September 18 2026 23:42 Crimson)S(hadow wrote: on the game where it loses to a barcode zerg on odyssey, game length 22:55, the bot/user types in the chat to the opponent at the end of the game in korean... idk if that info is useful in any way but maybe it gives a hint to who stole pluto
[00:19:45] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: ..;; [00:21:43] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: ghrtl [00:21:44] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: By any chance... [00:21:45] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: why are you doing this, [00:21:47] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: if I may ask? [00:22:08] ^333^: Isn't this kind of thing pretty common? [00:22:13] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: Your time... [00:22:15] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: don't you feel like you're wasting it..? [00:22:32] ^333^: Yeah, it is a waste. [00:22:35] IlIIlIIIIIIIl: Then why are you doing this..? [00:22:44] ^333^: gg
On September 18 2026 23:54 parkin wrote: It's fascinating to watch the replays of ^333^ vs korean pros. Against Larva he went 6rax m&m only, no ebay or turrets or +weapon or +armor upgrades at all. He just kind of out-zoned and surrounded the mutalisks and killed them and then counter attacked.
Against Iris he went cloaked wraiths into siege tanks + m&m, he brought a few scvs for repairs and soak up initial tank shots etc. I might be wrong but it looked like he blocked Iris scouting barracks from landing when his wraiths was attacking it. He did not get any armory upgrades here neither. It seems he doesn't value upgrades very highly.
When he's about to win he starts upgrading medic restoration for some reason.
If there would be AI opponent that were more human-like and you could set the skill level, play style and build orders etc it would be amazing as a practice partner.
also did the same no-ebay mass MM style against ret, in theory it makes sense... why make turrets which do explosive damage when you can just make MM which do full damage to mutas?
maybe when flash gets his bionic arm he could perform an optimized non-AI version of this build
On September 18 2026 21:53 Puosu wrote: I watched one of the reps against Paralyze
the bot went mnm + lockdown
won with peak apm ~2000
bio + ghost reminds me of scan's old TvP style in 2v2, sk terran + ghost... scan would play a lot of these epic games back when he used to stream on twitch, good times
EPT
