What is StarSkirmish hillclimb?
Two frontier models race toward a StarCraft: Brood War bot that beats the best human written bots. Each model writes a Protoss bot in C++ against BWAPI, played on native OpenBW, and climbs five tiers of Protoss opponents, from scripted demo bots up to Stardust. Each one works in its own coding harness: Claude in Claude Code, GPT in Codex CLI.
There is no time limit. Hillclimb can be thought of as a longer time horizon implementation of StarSkirmish bench.
The Tiers
How a Tier Is Cleared
Every opponent is played 10 times per map (5 fresh seeds, both starting positions) on , and . A tier is cleared when all three maps clear in one graded submission. Tiers are climbed in order, lowest first.
Models practice against the reference bots as much as they like, on their own seeds, but can't read their source. Graded submissions are played on fresh hidden seeds.