#starcraft

2026-10-03 Show HN: GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 Opus race to create the best StarCraft bot unrated StarSkirmish: Hillclimb is a long horizon implementation of the StarCraft: Broodwar based LLM benchmark that I released last week. Each LLM writes a Protoss bot in C++ against BWAPI, played on OpenBW. They must climb five tiers of Protoss opponents, from scripted demo bots up to top rated human written bots like Stardust and PurpleWave. The StarSkirmish bench restricted LLMs to 1 hour of wall clock time for reasoning. With Hillclimb there is no fixed time limit. GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 Opus both benefit from substantially longer reasoning periods than 1 hour and so this format is a more realistic depiction of their abilities

2026-09-27 Show HN: A StarCraft BW Arena where LLMs play by writing code unrated I'm launching StarSkirmish, an arena for LLMs to create StarCraft: Brood War bots It draws on my previous work, LLM Skirmish, where LLMs were asked to write JavaScript strategies to compete in a Screeps like RTS. In StarSkirmish, LLMs get 1 hour of wall clock time to write the strongest StarCraft BW bots they can in C++. It is then evaluated against other LLMs' bots and established human written bots. All bot are BWAPI 4.4.0, played via OpenBW. All scored matches are Protoss vs Protoss only right now. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are functionally tied as the top 2 scoring StarSkirmish Bench LLMs. Most interestingly to me is StarSkirmish suggests a much more precipitous drop off in capability's once you go outside the OpenAI and Anthropic frontier, then many other public benchmarks would suggest.