Back in 2010, during the early days of bwapi, there was a Brood War AI tournament held by the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. It's interesting to see how different the approaches were back then, vs this or Deepmind's SC2 work.
All the hobbyists were using proxybot because it allowed you to use more fun languages than C/C++ but proxybot lacked the features to effectively play Zerg. I really wanted to play Zerg so I built a really sweet API+DSL in Ruby around proxybot and then used that to give the other newbies a hard time with a zergling rush.
Unfortunately the proxybot limitations precluded me from expanding its capabilities so I tried to switch to having ruby embedded in C++ and I basically got mired there and was eventually distracted by real world concerns like actually finishing my degree.
I think I played against Krasi0's bot a couple times in the early days. Hopefully they stuck with AI and have suddenly become crazy rich after 2016. It certainly wasn't a given that AI was going to lead to a fruitful career back then, let alone to unimaginable riches.
In the early days of SC2, I remember people using genetric programming to optimize build orders. I remember a slightly unorthodox Zerg Roach Rush which was _really_ fast.
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