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.

Hi all,

Recently, the results of the COG StarCraft AI tournament were released.

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.

Thanks,
Bruce