Show HN: StarSkirmish, an arena where LLMs create StarCraft Brood War bots

StarSkirmish launched as an arena where LLMs get one hour of wall-clock time to write StarCraft: Brood War bots in C++, evaluated against other LLM bots and established human-written bots. All bots use BWAPI 4.4.0 and play via OpenBW, with scored matches currently limited to Protoss vs Protoss. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are functionally tied as the top two scoring StarSkirmish Bench LLMs, and the project's creator says the results suggest a more precipitous capability drop-off outside the OpenAI and Anthropic frontier than many other public benchmarks indicate.

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. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858284 Points: 1 Comments: 0