AIIDE 2026 Schedule

The 2026 AIIDE Conference will take place from November 9th to 13th. The competition must be completed before this data so the results can be presented at the conference.

Registration for the 2026 AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition is now open with the following deadlines.

To register, please fill out the 2026 AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition Registration Form

• Registration Deadline: September 14
• Submission Deadline: October 14
• Competition Runs: October 20 to November 1
• Conference / Results: November 9 to 13

AIIDE Specific Rules

The following rules are specific only to the AIIDE competition.

Bot Naming

• NOTE: This rule is new for 2026
• At the start of the tournament, each bot will receieve a random alias that will be used as its in-game name during play. This name will be the same throughout the tournament so that learning can still take place based on bot names, but it will limit the amount of hard-coded planning against specific bot names.
• Please do not attempt to identify bots through other means or previously learned behavior. "Gatting around" this rule change is against the spirit of the competition and I will decide what to do if and when it comes up.

Competition Format and Final Ranking

• The tournament will be run for approximately one week in a round robin format
• The final results will be ranked by total win percentage after those round robins have been played

Map Pool

• The 2026 AIIDE map files will not be released before the competition. They will consist of 5 of the 10 maps from the 2025 competition as well as 5 maps chosen by me from a pool of maps vetted by the community

Open Source Submission Required

• Your submission must include the full source code for your bot, with easy to follow compilation / setup instructions
• Your bot must compile and run with an official release of the BWAPI libary
• Any attempts to omit or obfuscate the source code submission will result in disqualification
• If I cannot get your bot to compile prior to the start of the competition it will be disqualidied

Common Competition Rules

The following common rules apply to both the AIIDE and CoG competitions.

BWAPI Version

The official versions of the BWAPI libraries we will use are here, your bot must work with one of these downloads, depending on which you chose when you registered. Your bot MUST be compiled with one of the official release versions of BWAPI to ensure that it does not have any advantage due to API modifications.

• BWAPI 4.4.0
• BWAPI 4.2.0
• BWAPI 4.1.2
• BWAPI 3.7.4

One Bot Per Author

No individual person may appear as an author for more than one bot.

Game Type

The game type for the competition will be 1 vs 1 full game of StarCraft: BroodWar 1.16.1 with fog of war enabled. No cheat code will be enabled or allowed during the competition.

Time Limit

Games will have a 'frame limit' of 86400 frames, to simulate one hour of gameplay. If a game goes this long, it will be stopped and the in-game score will be used to determine the winner.

Bot Time-Out

Make sure that each onframe call does not run longer than 42ms. Entries that slow down games by repeatedly exceeding this time limit will lose games on time. In particular a bot will be given a game loss if one of the following occurs:

>= 1 frames exceed 10 seconds, or
>= 10 frames exceed 1 second, or
>= 320 frames exceed 55ms

Game Speed

All games will be played at setLocalSpeed(0) (fastest setting). Please make sure that your bot functions correctly on this setting. To avoid problems, base your 'timings' on unit counts or currentFrame() and not machine time. The in-game lobby game speed slider will be set to Normal (i.e. latency frames = 3)

Persistent File I/O

Bots will have read access to folder 'bwapi-data/read/' and write access to folder 'bwapi-data/write/', both of which will be in the standard location under the StarCraft root directory. IMPORTANT: File I/O works as follows:

• Before each game, the contents of the server-side read directory for your bot are copied to the client machine under 'bwapi-data/read/'. For the first round of the tournament this directory will be blank since a full round has not yet been played.
• During a game, you have write access to the 'bwapi-data/write/' folder and read access to the 'bwapi-data/read/' folder on the client you are currently playing on
• After the game ends, the contents of the 'bwapi-data/read/' folder are deleted, and the contents of the 'bwapi-data/write/' folder are sent to the server and stored in your bot's server-side write folder.
• WARNING: Step 3 may overwrite previous results if you are not careful in specifying unique filenames for each opponent that you play against.
• After each bot has played each other bot on the current map (one round robin on that map) the contents of each bot's server-side write folder are copied into the respective server-side read folder and the write folder is cleared.
• WARNING: Step 5 will over-write previous round data inside the server-side read folder. Your file output must either be cumulative, or have a filename scheme such that no overwrites will happen in order for your data to be preserved.
• The bot's server-side read folder is NEVER deleted throughout the tournament
• The next round starts, and from step 1 you will have access to your server-side read data from the previous rounds inside the client's 'bwapi-data/read/' folder

Again, due to the nature of overwriting the read folder with the contents of the write folder, your file names should be unique at least to the current opponent. Two popular choices for file naming schemes are:

• Results_EnemyName.txt - Inside this file you store all data about your matches against bot EnemyName. This file will be overwritten every round on the server, so make sure to read its contents each game, and write out the cumulative results into the write folder so you do not lose data after a round
• For example, you can store one line per map played inside this file so you have something like "EnemyName MapName Wins Losses ExtraData", then if you win a game on that map against that enemy, you read in the contents and then output "EnemyName MapName Wins+1 Losses ExtraData+NewData"
• Results_EnemyName_MapName_TimeStamp.txt - If you don't want to have a single file per enemy storing cumulative results, you can instead have a single file per game to store results with a unique time stamp or random number suffix. Please not that this is much slower, as your bot will play thousands of games and then have to process each file in the directory each time. Any time-out due to file processing is still a timeout and you will get a game loss. I strongly recommend the first option.

Software Rules

• Programs that attempt to cheat will be disqualified. Bots must disable the perfect information flag in the full-game tournament
• Bots that perform malicious behavior will be disqualified and banned from all future contests. This includes but is not limited to: Intentionally crashing StarCraft, Installing worms/viruses/malware on the host machine, Malicious utilization of resources such as sockets, files, zombie processes, Spamming the in-game console.
• Bots will be run on bare metal hardware running Windows 10. Entries must be tested on native Windows 10 before submission. If you have any Windows-version specific features we highly recommend you remove them. We will not be held responsible for entries that crash StarCraft due to our configuration of the system.

In-Game Rules

• Programs that attempt to cheat will be disqualified. Bots must disable the perfect information flag in the full-game tournament
• Games in which an agent crashes StarCraft will be counted as a loss
• Bots are not allowed to pause the game, games in which a bot pauses the game will be counted as a loss
• The following StarCraft bugs/tricks are permitted: Plague on interceptor, Units pressed through, Drops to defuse mines, Mineral walk, Manner Pylon, Lurker hold position, Observer over turret, Stacking air units.
• All other bugs/exploits are forbidden. Bots caught attempted these exploits will be disqualified. This includes but is not limit to: Flying drones and templars, Terran sliding buildings, Stacking ground units, Allied mines, Gas walk to get through blocked entrances or ramps