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hiyo guys, it's been a long time since I posted here
but this morning I woke up to such a fun artosis video www.youtube.com so now I'm here x)
I'll introduce myself briefly, just to get the credential out of the way ...
- I have been following broodwar since 2004 and been on TL.net
- While in undergrad, I was part of the team who built the winning BW bot ( Overmind)
- I have a PhD from MIT, my thesis topic was information gathering under uncertainty
- I have written blog posts about the DoTA2 AI ( https://evanthebouncy.medium.com/understanding-openai-five-16f8d177a957 ) and the SC2 AI ( https://evanthebouncy.medium.com/adversary-attractor-astonishment-cea801d761 ).
- I am currently a Professor, I still work on reinforcement learning / program-as-policy
So onto the bot itself
From reading the comment on Youtube, it seems the bot is trained under pure self-play using reinforcement learning. What that means is that the bot has played against itself in a hyperbolic time chamber for about 100s - 1000s of years, compute permitting.
It is implemented as a neural net without explicitly encoding high level strategies, and all the strategies are "emergent" from the training itself. So it will do a tank + m&m push at a given moment but it cannot explain why the push is the right idea. The decision to push at a given moment is learned through millions of trials and error.
So what walks out of the hyperbolic time chamber isn't a thoughtful master but more like a beast of great instinct. You can see from the replay where it will misplace its own command center, absolutely horrible building placements, and even lockdown its own tanks with ghosts :D. However its micro will be immaculate, it made a wraith that kept attacking high templars and never died, d-matrix tanks just in time. It is also capable of controlling multiple battlefronts at the same time, something Artosis remarked as well.
How to beat it
TL;DR: as a beast of great instinct, any action sequence that requires less than 10 seconds to process will be optimal by the bot. Conversely, any strategy planning that requires more than 2 minutes to materialize will confuse the bot immensely.
For a few days it will be difficult as the pros will try to "out execute it" because it'll be so exciting to fight someone who has 6000+ APM. This of course will not work because the bot has been microing for 1000s of years and has unlimited APM cap. The pros will also make calculation mistakes on engagement, where they think the current army will crush the bot's army, only to realize under perfect micro, the bot's army is effectively worth 2x their value in resources. This was the primary way pros lost to both the openAI Dota AI and the deepmind Starcraft AI.
But give it a week or two, it'll get figured out strategically. The limit of pure self-play is that 1) it is actually quite difficult to sample a diverse set of strategies to train against, and that 2) each new strategy requires the neural net 10s of years of effective training time to get aquatinted to from trial and error. So the bot does not know apriori a diverse set of strategies, and it cannot adapt quickly to a new strategy without 10 years of playing against it. So this bot will struggle against 1) novel cheese that is not present in its training set or 2) very long games (like 40 minutes) that's far beyond its typical game length during training.
It will also be very weak to fog of war, as the beast has only 10 seconds of attention span. If you fly a dropship out of vision range, it'll "forget" that it ever existed, allowing you to fly it back later. That's why the bot on the ladder has maphack on.
Conclusion
It is unfortunate the first wide exposure to the AI-vs-Human topic is through a cheating bot stolen from its original creators against their will. Nevertheless it is a good opportunity for us to reflect on what makes BW challenging and fun to play, and speculate on how we can make / beat AI systems.
The two linked medium blog post above has a more technical explanation on these RL-trained bots, for those who want a deeper dive.
-- evan
feel free to ask questions in comments and I'll reply!
if anyone (content creator, bot creator) want to do a collab on this topic, you can message me on Reddit u/evanthebouncy, it will be fun to chat at least x)
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Hello fellow alumnus! Very cool and interesting. I remember having a bet 8 years ago with a friend that there wouldn't be a bot that could beat a human for at least 10 years. It seems I am likely to lose that bet.
I'm particularly interested in this because I've encountered cheaters who use bots to help them. In other words, a human is predominantly playing but is aided by a near-infinite APM bot with map hack. In TvZ, his go-to strategy was to turtle and mass Science Vessels. It was impossible to scourge them because map hack allowed them to always move to where there were no scourge. Each Science Vessel would just irradiate everything on the map, never moving as a group so you could never Plague them.
That also got me thinking though -- do AIs respect clickability? If there are 5 Lurkers burrowed in a stack, you should never be able to irradiate more than one of them at once, because clicking on the stack deterministically always returns the same unit. Similarly, if an Overlord is perfectly on top of a unit with no pixels visible, it should not be possible for the AI to click below the Overlord. Being able to do so would be cheating. Also they should not be able to do the worker glitch using a mineral patch in fog of war. If you are in contact with the COG competition organizer I'd like to reach him as well. Thanks!
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I'm currently a professor at MIT and was also an undergrad there (who lost miserably to StRyKeR when he was hosting broodwar tournaments at the school). I'm really excited to see this development and just want to thank whoever is making this bot. I really hope we see the story continue to develop, maybe eventually with limitations on play that encourage it to develop human imitable strategies. It was an exciting time when alphago influenced human opening play.
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Wait...the bot has maphacks!?? How does Battle.net allow that to happen, let alone it being unfair.
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Osaka27178 Posts
Great to see you post evan! Really interesting to see your take on things.
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On September 19 2026 12:29 StRyKeR wrote:
Hello fellow alumnus! Very cool and interesting. I remember having a bet 8 years ago with a friend that there wouldn't be a bot that could beat a human for at least 10 years. It seems I am likely to lose that bet.
I'm particularly interested in this because I've encountered cheaters who use bots to help them. In other words, a human is predominantly playing but is aided by a near-infinite APM bot with map hack. In TvZ, his go-to strategy was to turtle and mass Science Vessels. It was impossible to scourge them because map hack allowed them to always move to where there were no scourge. Each Science Vessel would just irradiate everything on the map, never moving as a group so you could never Plague them.
That also got me thinking though -- do AIs respect clickability? If there are 5 Lurkers burrowed in a stack, you should never be able to irradiate more than one of them at once, because clicking on the stack deterministically always returns the same unit. Similarly, if an Overlord is perfectly on top of a unit with no pixels visible, it should not be possible for the AI to click below the Overlord. Being able to do so would be cheating. Also they should not be able to do the worker glitch using a mineral patch in fog of war. If you are in contact with the COG competition organizer I'd like to reach him as well. Thanks!
from what I remember the API has access to the raw list of units, so it's not bound by UI on what you can/cannot click on. So stacked lurker will show up as a distinct list of 5 lurkers
and yeah I always imagined a human/AI hybrid would work really well. Something even a scripted AI will do well is macro, it'll never get supply blocked and you can calculate how to best route resources.
I do think at the current rate of LLM, perhaps a very strong agent will be one that plays near autonomously, but with human typing in chat on the high level maneuvers the bot should be doing, such as scouting at a certain location, or gear up for some unit transition, and the decision to attack or not.
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Long time no see, Evan! I was fanatacist back when you were active IIRC.
Just wanted to link you this other thread where the SSCAIT community has been discussing this bot and where they made a statement about it here:
https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/646339-bot-on-ladder
Figured there would be some interesting info there for you.
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On September 19 2026 12:37 Muirhead wrote:
I'm currently a professor at MIT and was also an undergrad there (who lost miserably to StRyKeR when he was hosting broodwar tournaments at the school). I'm really excited to see this development and just want to thank whoever is making this bot. I really hope we see the story continue to develop, maybe eventually with limitations on play that encourage it to develop human imitable strategies. It was an exciting time when alphago influenced human opening play.
How "deep" do you think starcraft actually is? For something like chess/go I think the bots basically flushed out the entire policy space so there's little one can do to beat them, unless we go for some really really adversarial strategies that's out of their training distribution. So the progression of game getting "figured out" is something like tictactoe --> connect4 --> chess --> go --> starcraft where we basically saturate the whole policy space and nothing new can be discovered
Part of me hope that starcraft would be deep enough (and non-stationary enough due to fog of war) so that the AI couldn't just flush the entire policy space.
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On September 19 2026 12:42 Manifesto7 wrote:
Great to see you post evan! Really interesting to see your take on things.
nice to see you still active too mani <3
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On September 19 2026 13:33 Jealous wrote:Long time no see, Evan! I was fanatacist back when you were active IIRC. Just wanted to link you this other thread where the SSCAIT community has been discussing this bot and where they made a statement about it here: https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/646339-bot-on-ladderFigured there would be some interesting info there for you.
thx! I did read the whole thread over there yeah.
and it's fun to see how people become more mature and civilized after their account gets banned a few times on TL lol. We were such cringe back in the days but we grew up 
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Hey you guys! All the ole grampas appear to be coming out of the woodworks
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Some questions:
Does a bot like this suffer from a short attention span due to bottlenecks in capacity, and would expanding the allocated memory or hardware also significantly improve its performance?
Do these type of bots solely learn from trial and error through simulations, or could they also be fed a huge database of replays? And would the idea of feeding a bot 500k replays also cap the bots' ceiling due to suboptimal human execution/strategy?
Since the bot's current self learning has not identified to optimize some basic fundamentals such as CC placements, would a hybrid architecture approach be viable, and would this significantly help the bots performance? (i.e. hardcoding a basic rule set). Or is this just not desirable from a theoretical perspective (testing the bots full capacity through self learning)?
And finally.. Do you think it is a coincidence that the bot was released simultaneously with PvZ balance whining being at an all time peak? How likely is this a conspiracy orchestrated by TL's Protoss players? And since the strategical innovation in PvZ appears to be locked in place for many years, what are the odds a bot will actually discover some new radical solutions that would also be able to be applicable by human players?
Cheers & wb!
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On September 19 2026 13:30 evanthebouncy! wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2026 12:29 StRyKeR wrote:
Hello fellow alumnus! Very cool and interesting. I remember having a bet 8 years ago with a friend that there wouldn't be a bot that could beat a human for at least 10 years. It seems I am likely to lose that bet.
I'm particularly interested in this because I've encountered cheaters who use bots to help them. In other words, a human is predominantly playing but is aided by a near-infinite APM bot with map hack. In TvZ, his go-to strategy was to turtle and mass Science Vessels. It was impossible to scourge them because map hack allowed them to always move to where there were no scourge. Each Science Vessel would just irradiate everything on the map, never moving as a group so you could never Plague them.
That also got me thinking though -- do AIs respect clickability? If there are 5 Lurkers burrowed in a stack, you should never be able to irradiate more than one of them at once, because clicking on the stack deterministically always returns the same unit. Similarly, if an Overlord is perfectly on top of a unit with no pixels visible, it should not be possible for the AI to click below the Overlord. Being able to do so would be cheating. Also they should not be able to do the worker glitch using a mineral patch in fog of war. If you are in contact with the COG competition organizer I'd like to reach him as well. Thanks! from what I remember the API has access to the raw list of units, so it's not bound by UI on what you can/cannot click on. So stacked lurker will show up as a distinct list of 5 lurkers and yeah I always imagined a human/AI hybrid would work really well. Something even a scripted AI will do well is macro, it'll never get supply blocked and you can calculate how to best route resources. I do think at the current rate of LLM, perhaps a very strong agent will be one that plays near autonomously, but with human typing in chat on the high level maneuvers the bot should be doing, such as scouting at a certain location, or gear up for some unit transition, and the decision to attack or not.
That's what I thought. That's problematic, because they're playing a different game from humans. Bot vs bot I guess anything goes, but bot vs human cannot be done fairly if clickability isn't enforced.
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On September 19 2026 14:59 StRyKeR wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2026 13:30 evanthebouncy! wrote:On September 19 2026 12:29 StRyKeR wrote:
Hello fellow alumnus! Very cool and interesting. I remember having a bet 8 years ago with a friend that there wouldn't be a bot that could beat a human for at least 10 years. It seems I am likely to lose that bet.
I'm particularly interested in this because I've encountered cheaters who use bots to help them. In other words, a human is predominantly playing but is aided by a near-infinite APM bot with map hack. In TvZ, his go-to strategy was to turtle and mass Science Vessels. It was impossible to scourge them because map hack allowed them to always move to where there were no scourge. Each Science Vessel would just irradiate everything on the map, never moving as a group so you could never Plague them.
That also got me thinking though -- do AIs respect clickability? If there are 5 Lurkers burrowed in a stack, you should never be able to irradiate more than one of them at once, because clicking on the stack deterministically always returns the same unit. Similarly, if an Overlord is perfectly on top of a unit with no pixels visible, it should not be possible for the AI to click below the Overlord. Being able to do so would be cheating. Also they should not be able to do the worker glitch using a mineral patch in fog of war. If you are in contact with the COG competition organizer I'd like to reach him as well. Thanks! from what I remember the API has access to the raw list of units, so it's not bound by UI on what you can/cannot click on. So stacked lurker will show up as a distinct list of 5 lurkers and yeah I always imagined a human/AI hybrid would work really well. Something even a scripted AI will do well is macro, it'll never get supply blocked and you can calculate how to best route resources. I do think at the current rate of LLM, perhaps a very strong agent will be one that plays near autonomously, but with human typing in chat on the high level maneuvers the bot should be doing, such as scouting at a certain location, or gear up for some unit transition, and the decision to attack or not. That's what I thought. That's problematic, because they're playing a different game from humans. Bot vs bot I guess anything goes, but bot vs human cannot be done fairly if clickability isn't enforced.
An argument I've heard in response to this kind of thing is that it is unfair to the AI that we are the product of a billion years of evolution 🙂
The AI has many advantages: no mouse so no mouse inaccuracy, no eyes so no blinking, no screen so no limit on its "vision", no fingers so no misclicks, etc. Lowering the APM cap, enforcing clickability, so on and so forth will hamper the AI and make it more "human", sure, but where is the line drawn? Does it need to have a limit to what it can see at one time? Do we need to build cybertronic cameras for "eyes" and make them move and blink? How about fingers and put it behind a keyboard to ensure it can make input errors? So on and so forth. It feels like a slippery slope scenario.
We have brains that can detect patterns and develop response strategies far faster than any AI. We have "game sense" and intuition. We can go off the rails and do something wacky we saw a progamer do 20 years ago and we can do random shit at any time and experiment outside the box while it is stuck in its current developmental state, maybe trying a few different builds it was equipped with (or "devised" after thousands of games, to be fair). We have communities we discuss these topics with, share ideas with, and develop responses to various strategies with, along the lines of what Evan was saying above. After all, it doesn't even know that a Shuttle can contain a devastating Reaver inside of it at the moment.
So, I think one can approach this perceived imbalance like something which I find very apropos for this topic: Protoss vs. Zerg. An asymmetrical "balance" (😉) where both sides have different tools.
Personally, I found that part of the thrill of competing against AI was "outsmarting" them, "abusing" their limitations after discovering them via trial and error, despite the mechanical disadvantages of these chobo hands.
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Wow nice. I will also post after a long time. Thanks to OP. Amazing analysis.
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On September 19 2026 15:27 Jealous wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2026 14:59 StRyKeR wrote:On September 19 2026 13:30 evanthebouncy! wrote:On September 19 2026 12:29 StRyKeR wrote:
Hello fellow alumnus! Very cool and interesting. I remember having a bet 8 years ago with a friend that there wouldn't be a bot that could beat a human for at least 10 years. It seems I am likely to lose that bet.
I'm particularly interested in this because I've encountered cheaters who use bots to help them. In other words, a human is predominantly playing but is aided by a near-infinite APM bot with map hack. In TvZ, his go-to strategy was to turtle and mass Science Vessels. It was impossible to scourge them because map hack allowed them to always move to where there were no scourge. Each Science Vessel would just irradiate everything on the map, never moving as a group so you could never Plague them.
That also got me thinking though -- do AIs respect clickability? If there are 5 Lurkers burrowed in a stack, you should never be able to irradiate more than one of them at once, because clicking on the stack deterministically always returns the same unit. Similarly, if an Overlord is perfectly on top of a unit with no pixels visible, it should not be possible for the AI to click below the Overlord. Being able to do so would be cheating. Also they should not be able to do the worker glitch using a mineral patch in fog of war. If you are in contact with the COG competition organizer I'd like to reach him as well. Thanks! from what I remember the API has access to the raw list of units, so it's not bound by UI on what you can/cannot click on. So stacked lurker will show up as a distinct list of 5 lurkers and yeah I always imagined a human/AI hybrid would work really well. Something even a scripted AI will do well is macro, it'll never get supply blocked and you can calculate how to best route resources. I do think at the current rate of LLM, perhaps a very strong agent will be one that plays near autonomously, but with human typing in chat on the high level maneuvers the bot should be doing, such as scouting at a certain location, or gear up for some unit transition, and the decision to attack or not. That's what I thought. That's problematic, because they're playing a different game from humans. Bot vs bot I guess anything goes, but bot vs human cannot be done fairly if clickability isn't enforced. An argument I've heard in response to this kind of thing is that it is unfair to the AI that we are the product of a billion years of evolution 🙂 The AI has many advantages: no mouse so no mouse inaccuracy, no eyes so no blinking, no screen so no limit on its "vision", no fingers so no misclicks, etc. Lowering the APM cap, enforcing clickability, so on and so forth will hamper the AI and make it more "human", sure, but where is the line drawn? Does it need to have a limit to what it can see at one time? Do we need to build cybertronic cameras for "eyes" and make them move and blink? How about fingers and put it behind a keyboard to ensure it can make input errors? So on and so forth. It feels like a slippery slope scenario. We have brains that can detect patterns and develop response strategies far faster than any AI. We have "game sense" and intuition. We can go off the rails and do something wacky we saw a progamer do 20 years ago and we can do random shit at any time and experiment outside the box while it is stuck in its current developmental state, maybe trying a few different builds it was equipped with (or "devised" after thousands of games, to be fair). We have communities we discuss these topics with, share ideas with, and develop responses to various strategies with, along the lines of what Evan was saying above. After all, it doesn't even know that a Shuttle can contain a devastating Reaver inside of it at the moment. So, I think one can approach this perceived imbalance like something which I find very apropos for this topic: Protoss vs. Zerg. An asymmetrical "balance" (😉) where both sides have different tools. Personally, I found that part of the thrill of competing against AI was "outsmarting" them, "abusing" their limitations after discovering them via trial and error, despite the mechanical disadvantages of these chobo hands.
I agree. But my argument isn't about giving humans an edge as much as possible or forcing the AI to have human limitations. It's about deciding what's considered cheating. Just because an AI has an API doesn't mean its API set is reasonable.
For example, no one would seriously consider letting the AI map hack even though they have access to it.
The same goes for various glitches in the game we deemed off limits. For humans, we ban various glitches such as indefinite worker stack, mineral walking without vision of minerals, money hacks, etc. If an AI stumbled upon a sequence of moves that recreated such glitches, we would consider it cheating.
Not being able to delay Irradiates by stacking Lurkers is a huge change to the game's mechanics.
Z-axis ordering and clickability is a major part of the game, so I don't see why we should let AI completely ignore it. Taking out z-axis ordering is similar to removing the fog of war or letting workers stay stacked indefinitely. We already draw a line on what actions are deemed illegal, outside of the game's own restrictions. So the philosophy of "let's just let AI do whatever it can" is already not the case. Let's be consistent in enforcing the rules of the game.
As an aside, the COG competition already imposes a computational limit, corroborating my philosophy of maintaining the intent of the game: "While there is no limit to how fast a bot can run, we do place limits on how slowly a bot can run, after all it is a real-time strategy game. The main rule for the competition is that a bot is not allowed to have too many individual frames that exceed a specific amount of computational time." In effect, this limitation forces the AI to prioritize the actions it takes instead of just "do it all". It probably also naturally limits their APM. Very reasonable to me.
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absolutly agree with strykers take. It would be way more interesting watching it compete in that way
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On September 19 2026 13:44 Smorrie wrote:Hey you guys! All the ole grampas appear to be coming out of the woodworks Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Some questions: Does a bot like this suffer from a short attention span due to bottlenecks in capacity, and would expanding the allocated memory or hardware also significantly improve its performance? Do these type of bots solely learn from trial and error through simulations, or could they also be fed a huge database of replays? And would the idea of feeding a bot 500k replays also cap the bots' ceiling due to suboptimal human execution/strategy? Since the bot's current self learning has not identified to optimize some basic fundamentals such as CC placements, would a hybrid architecture approach be viable, and would this significantly help the bots performance? (i.e. hardcoding a basic rule set). Or is this just not desirable from a theoretical perspective (testing the bots full capacity through self learning)? And finally.. Do you think it is a coincidence that the bot was released simultaneously with PvZ balance whining being at an all time peak? How likely is this a conspiracy orchestrated by TL's Protoss players? And since the strategical innovation in PvZ appears to be locked in place for many years, what are the odds a bot will actually discover some new radical solutions that would also be able to be applicable by human players? Cheers & wb!
the bot suffers from short attention span due to how it is trained. more specifically this is called "reward assignment". given a long sequence of action that resulted in a successful reward, it is very hard to tell an agent which part of that sequence is responsible for that reward. Is it reaver firing scarab? or is it loading and unloading the reaver? or something else? but it is very easy to tell actions are good or bad when the sequence is short, for instance, stepping on a spidermine is immediately bad. so consequently the bot knows hwo to evaluate, and generate, short-term sequences well, but suffers from long sequences required for a full on strategy.
they could also learn from a large body of replays, but it will learn it in a way that's very straight forward: on this game state, carry out this exact action. After it learned from these replays, we can of course again let the bot to play freely in hope it'll discover something more optimal than the human-like actions.
the hard part is neural net based reinforcement learning and scripted strategies are _very hard to mix in practice_. For instance, when should we use the neural net agent to play, when should we default back to the scripted code to play? do the two strategies integrate well? what if one tells the marine to retreat and oen tells it to attack? it'll be chaos
I don't know about that last point haah that's too much tinfoil hat
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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.
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Belgium6784 Posts
I do wonder if pure self play is the superior choice given the blind spots it has. I remember before AlphaZero was trained with pure self play they first trained AlphaGo on human games and then let it do self-play on top of that to achieve superhuman performance. Given how refined human strats in scbw are I wonder if it could be useful to do the same here.
I'm just wondering if it will ever learn shuttle+reaver or sair usage through self-play alone. I'm assuming pluto learns through small temperature changes so it might take along time for it to stumble upon such strats. So having some human examples might speed up its evolution.
Although admittedly it's hilarious to see it crush mech with m&m in TvT lol
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I do wonder if pure self play is the superior choice given the blind spots it has.
The OpenAI Dota2 bot hyper-trained specific skills that wouldn't have emerged naturally: blocking creeps in mid lane, for example. Based on what I've seen, teaching the bots how to place CC's (find ideal positioning) and clear its own ramp (mine small mineral patches and kill neutral buildings) would be some of the most valuable deliberate practice targets.
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On 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.
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
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On September 20 2026 05:00 Xeofreestyler wrote:
I do wonder if pure self play is the superior choice given the blind spots it has. I remember before AlphaZero was trained with pure self play they first trained AlphaGo on human games and then let it do self-play on top of that to achieve superhuman performance. Given how refined human strats in scbw are I wonder if it could be useful to do the same here.
I'm just wondering if it will ever learn shuttle+reaver or sair usage through self-play alone. I'm assuming pluto learns through small temperature changes so it might take along time for it to stumble upon such strats. So having some human examples might speed up its evolution.
Although admittedly it's hilarious to see it crush mech with m&m in TvT lol
I think alphaGo was initialized with human then later on with RL on top to improve. AlphaZero iirc was entirely from self play.
One issue I see with using human replay for stacraft is that, unlike go, human and AI basically play different games altogether where the AI will have perfect micro while humans do not. Consequently, a lot of human strategies (like muta harass or drops) are attention-attack strategies where you try to spend 1s of time to execute something which would cost the opponent 10s of seconds to resolve. These kind of attention-attack strategies won't work on AI as the pros have found out.
Yet you do need some build orders! I'm a bit skeptical if it'll randomly stumble upon shuttle/reaver or any given strategy, even with a higher temperature in sampling actions. I think higher strategy will just degrade performance rather than promoting diversity. The author said himself that strategies (build orders) had to be loosely guided from human created BOs.
I do think the next form of this bot is a traditional NN controller (as we have now in pluto) combined with a LLM commander that can issue high level commands. This LLM commander can just be any run of the mill LLM like claude or GPT, and humans can basically add some prompt to it for it to "figure out more of the game" so to speak. Ofc engineering such a system requires a lot of work, but I do expect a system like that to emerge in the next 2 years at most.
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Russian Federation383 Posts
We (human and AI) are already play different games. And the reason is that AI trained to play via different interface.
I think what you meant by attention-attack is what we call multi-tasking. Muta harass is not an attention-attack. It's better to call it as abuse of mechanic. It lives in the same space as: fast load/unload reaver, valks patrol micro, stacked lurkers.
The reason it doesn't work with AI is much simplier: AI have ability to target low HP muta in the stack. We humans try to do that too, but we only can send command like this: with this pack of rines, target one of the muta in the stack by randomly clicking attack on the stack. And no one would bother to stack lurkers If we could target exact lurker.
AlphaZero plays Go via the same interface as human, pick stone -> put stone. Pluto and every other AI in RTS doesn't. We won't see a real move 37 in starcraft, because of the current setup: ability for AI to see a state which human doesn't and to control things human can't reach, indeed it is a different game yet they play.
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On September 20 2026 18:21 iFU.spx wrote:
We (human and AI) are already play different games. And the reason is that AI trained to play via different interface.
I think what you meant by attention-attack is what we call multi-tasking. Muta harass is not an attention-attack. It's better to call it as abuse of mechanic. It lives in the same space as: fast load/unload reaver, valks patrol micro, stacked lurkers.
The reason it doesn't work with AI is much simplier: AI have ability to target low HP muta in the stack. We humans try to do that too, but we only can send command like this: with this pack of rines, target one of the muta in the stack by randomly clicking attack on the stack. And no one would bother to stack lurkers If we could target exact lurker.
AlphaZero plays Go via the same interface as human, pick stone -> put stone. Pluto and every other AI in RTS doesn't. We won't see a real move 37 in starcraft, because of the current setup: ability for AI to see a state which human doesn't and to control things human can't reach, indeed it is a different game yet they play.
Agreed. I think z-ordering (units stacked below another cannot be clicked) is a fundamental game mechanic and ignoring that is very close to cheating. AI should be free from human limits, not game limits. A good litmus test to see what should be allowed or not is: "Can a human with infinite speed and time perform this action?" If the answer is no, then it should be illegal for bots.
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Belgium6784 Posts
That's a good point, and I think the reason nobody cared until now is that bots were simply nowhere near the strategic thinking level of humans. Perhaps now is a good time for a bwapi v2 where this litmus test is taken into consideration. It does make things considerably harder for developing them.
Something I'm wondering: does a bot know a cloaked unit is nearby? I.e. like how we see an optical distortion
Edit: nvm apparently it's instantly aware of it
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Watching progamers try to beat a starcraft AI is such a trip. I reread 15+ year old threads theorizing on what AI should do to beat humans. 10 years ago I thought it would take a lot of resources to train such a bot to beat starcraft progamer level just like in Dota2. Now someone can just train a bot easily to beat top players.
It is great that TL has the history.
On October 13 2010 05:23 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On October 13 2010 05:13 polgas wrote:
Just efficient massing of zerglings/marines/zealots and beat human with perfect micro. Any unit that get injured gets pulled back and healed while the rest of the units keep attacking. This is simply not true. There is a ceiling to how good micro gets and progamers aren't all that far below it. Give Stork 9 dragoons and a computer 8 and Stork will always win, even if the computer has perfect micro. Focus fire + move in cooldown is pretty basic stuff and pulling back wounded units doesn't help you when they die in two volleys and the attacking units have the same movement speed.
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Belgium6784 Posts
Now someone can just train a bot easily to beat top players.
yeah idk about that, this guy works at meta and probably had access to a shitton of compute
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On September 21 2026 03:20 Xeofreestyler wrote:yeah idk about that, this guy works at meta and probably had access to a shitton of compute
I doubt the bot can beat top players without high level strategy.
there is one thing to "win a game from top players before anyone know you"
there's a different thing to "win consistently against top players with a target on your back"
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EPT
