{"slug": "show-hn-gpt-6-astra-and-claude-5-5-opus-race-to-create-the-best-starcraft-bot", "title": "Show HN: GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 Opus race to create the best StarCraft bot", "summary": "A developer released StarSkirmish: Hillclimb, a long-horizon StarCraft: Broodwar LLM benchmark in which each model writes a Protoss bot in C++ against BWAPI, played on OpenBW, climbing five tiers of Protoss opponents from scripted demo bots up to top-rated human-written bots including Stardust and PurpleWave. The Hillclimb format removes the 1-hour wall-clock reasoning limit of the original StarSkirmish bench, and the developer says GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 Opus both benefit from substantially longer reasoning periods than 1 hour, making the format a more realistic depiction of their abilities.", "body_md": "StarSkirmish: Hillclimb is a long horizon implementation of the StarCraft: Broodwar based LLM benchmark that I released last week.\n\nEach 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.\n\nThe StarSkirmish bench restricted LLMs to 1 hour of wall clock time for reasoning. With Hillclimb there is no fixed time limit.\n\nGPT-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\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49935608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49935608)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 1", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-gpt-6-astra-and-claude-5-5-opus-race-to-create-the-best-starcraft-bot", "canonical_source": "https://starskirmish.com/hillclimb/", "published_at": "2026-10-02 16:42:36+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-02 17:06:29.035368+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["StarSkirmish", "StarSkirmish: Hillclimb", "GPT-6 Astra", "Claude 5.5 Opus", "StarCraft: Broodwar", "BWAPI", "OpenBW", "Stardust"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-gpt-6-astra-and-claude-5-5-opus-race-to-create-the-best-starcraft-bot", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-gpt-6-astra-and-claude-5-5-opus-race-to-create-the-best-starcraft-bot.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-gpt-6-astra-and-claude-5-5-opus-race-to-create-the-best-starcraft-bot.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-gpt-6-astra-and-claude-5-5-opus-race-to-create-the-best-starcraft-bot.jsonld"}}