EPTOn September 20 2026 02:17 PurpleWave wrote:
Good to see you here Evan. I don't know if you saw that I got Overmind running on modern BWAPI and playing on BASIL.
Some clarifications, some from the Pluto FAQ, some from chatting with the author, and some from watching hundreds of Pluto games.
Pluto was trained without map hacks and is designed to run without map hacks. It won the COG tournament easily without them. Only the cheater who is playing with Pluto is using a map hack.
It does not explicitly encode high level strategies but does have a Thompson-sampled strategy bandit. It was trained with rewards for following the selected build order (but is not forced to do so).
The model includes recurrent state to assist with long-term memory.
Pluto has generalized impressively well against out-of-distribution play. For the COG tournament I spent weeks trying to cheese it. I threw kitchen sink at it. Nothing stuck. Its unit handling is so good that it deflects attacks even with strategies that just die on paper.
It does have a few clear weaknesses, including ones which match your predictions. It has not learned to use Shuttles or Dropships. Human player G5 beat it with Reaver harassment. But Pluto is strong enough that it can often overcome this anyway; Paralyze failed to beat it even while doing significant damage.
It also has weak building placement, to the point that it is not competent at Forge/Gateway walls against Zerg, leading it to rely on one-base strategies (and be undertrained against two-base strategies). On the Zerg side it is still somehow strong at busting the walls that it is not trained against.
If you are thinking about doing any videos or other content about the topic I'm happy to collaborate.
Good to see you here Evan. I don't know if you saw that I got Overmind running on modern BWAPI and playing on BASIL.
Some clarifications, some from the Pluto FAQ, some from chatting with the author, and some from watching hundreds of Pluto games.
Pluto was trained without map hacks and is designed to run without map hacks. It won the COG tournament easily without them. Only the cheater who is playing with Pluto is using a map hack.
It does not explicitly encode high level strategies but does have a Thompson-sampled strategy bandit. It was trained with rewards for following the selected build order (but is not forced to do so).
The model includes recurrent state to assist with long-term memory.
Pluto has generalized impressively well against out-of-distribution play. For the COG tournament I spent weeks trying to cheese it. I threw kitchen sink at it. Nothing stuck. Its unit handling is so good that it deflects attacks even with strategies that just die on paper.
It does have a few clear weaknesses, including ones which match your predictions. It has not learned to use Shuttles or Dropships. Human player G5 beat it with Reaver harassment. But Pluto is strong enough that it can often overcome this anyway; Paralyze failed to beat it even while doing significant damage.
It also has weak building placement, to the point that it is not competent at Forge/Gateway walls against Zerg, leading it to rely on one-base strategies (and be undertrained against two-base strategies). On the Zerg side it is still somehow strong at busting the walls that it is not trained against.
If you are thinking about doing any videos or other content about the topic I'm happy to collaborate.
I did know that overmind is used as a kind of baseline in starcraft AI scene yeah! and wow that's cool. It's quite something to know my sunken colony code survived still today aha :D
I think even the cheater's stolen version can be beat reliably by pros in due time, they just need some time to figure out.
That being said it'll be so fun to have a chat and watch the real pluto in action. And yeah we should do a video. I'll send you a dm
