September 22, 2026
Pluto's StarCraft wins are not a clean benchmark: account No. 5 played with maphack
On September 18, the Brood War AI community reported that an account using Pluto reached #5 on the global StarCraft ladder and played with maphack. In replays, the bot defeated Larva, Iris, Ret, and Paralyze. These matches cannot be compared with Pluto's tournament result.
In August, Pluto won the CoG 2026 final against PurpleWave 4:1. A total of 14 430 games were played during the tournament. Previously, bots followed predefined scripts, but Pluto became the first competition entry built entirely through reinforcement learning: one model chooses tactics for any of the three races.
The tournament CPU version has 315 million parameters and makes up to 4 actions per second. Thousands of APM on screen do not mean thousands of decisions: the game counts commands issued to multiple units separately.
Ladder under different rules. An unknown person ran Pluto without the author's permission and with maphack, even though the bot was trained with fog of war. Against Larva, it built 6 Barracks, produced Marines with Medics, and won without Attack, Armor, or Missile Turrets upgrades.
Public beta. Pluto can be installed in StarCraft: Brood War 1.16.1 through BWAPI 4.4.0 by extracting the archive into `bwapi-data/AI/` and specifying `ai = bwapi-data/AI/pluto.dll` in `bwapi.ini`. The GPU version requires NVIDIA Pascal or newer and 2,5 GB of video memory; the CPU version recommends 6 cores and 2 GB of RAM.
The official Pluto beta can play as Zerg, Terran, Protoss, or choose a race at random.
