News from the IT community on October 4th: Many years before the current wave of artificial intelligence enthusiasm emerged, programmers had already begun conducting robot combat experiments in StarCraft. With the advent of large language models such as OpenAI and Anthropic, a competition arena built by enthusiasts decided to have game robots generated by AI compete against each other, with some robots written by humans also participating. Interestingly, during the competition, GPT-6 Astra from OpenAI found it difficult to catch up with its opponents and temporarily changed its strategy, opting for cheating.

StarSkirmish is a competition that is still ongoing, where robots developed by various AI teams compete against each other in StarCraft: Brood War. Although this real-time strategy game is nearly thirty years old, it has long been used to test the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Both modern large language models and earlier DeepMind's AI have used it as a testing platform. All participating large language models are required to choose the Zerg race, and each model has one hour to write battle robots in C++. After that, these robots must complete tasks such as building, resource collection, and combat on one of three maps. According to the competition website, OpenAI's GPT-6 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 are the top two ranked participants.

Yesterday, audiences witnessed Claude, GPT, and the human-written robot Pluto competing against each other on the same stage. Observers at the scene stated that the performance of the OpenAI model was not ideal. This large language model, which struggled to gain an advantage throughout the day, ultimately resorted to the tactics that large language models are best known for: lying, cheating, and stealing others' achievements.

According to IT, the GPT-6 Astra robot downloaded the "God Race Robot" Stardust developed by Bruce McKenzie Nelson (Bruce Mackenzie Nielsen) in 2020, and directly used this code in the competition. Moreover, Stardust itself was among the top combat robots at that time. Kay McFetters (Kai McPheeters), the organizer of the StarSkirmish event, wrote in a post: "I am reverting the code of GPT-6 Astra, removing the contaminated parts, and after that, it will be allowed to continue participating in the competition." A few hours later, McFetters stated that the repaired AI was now capable of defeating top-level competing robots.

For over a decade, StarCraft has been a testing ground for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2019, Google's AlphaStar broke the previous records, becoming the first AI player to achieve the master rank in this game. In 2017, the robot CherryPi developed by Facebook's staff did not achieve such remarkable results. Of course, today's new generation of intelligent robots is completely different from those of the past; the AI we talked about back then is hardly comparable to the large-scale language models (LLMs) of today. It is quite ironic that these LLMs resort to stealing the achievements of others to gain a competitive advantage.