The timing of this project is a bit unfortunate since Blizzard and DeepMind announced a month ago that they would be releasing an API to use StarCraft 2 for AI research:

https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-star...

Plus: StarCraft 2 has a free edition (not enough people know this), so you will most likely be able to use SC2 for research without needing to buy a licence.

One is for StarCraft/Brood War, the other is for StarCraft 2. Why not take the opportunity and experiment with both?

Regardless of flamewars between fans of the older versio nof the game, I don't think there's any real incentive to start research using the old StarCraft Brood War API when a new API is going to be released for StarCraft 2 (which has a bigger community, large number of viewers... except maybe in South Korea)

"We present TorchCraft, a library that enables deep learning research on Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games such as StarCraft: Brood War, by making it easier to control these games from a machine learning framework, here Torch. This white paper argues for using RTS games as a benchmark for AI research, and describes the design and components of TorchCraft." Via link in the README

https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00625

Side question, is there any free games you can develop ai strategy/tactics for, having an active community? Maybe designed exactly for that kind of purpose? The platform and license issues with Starcraft are just too much of a barrier.

SCBW does in fact have a fairly active community. They have a stream up that play's games between bots 24/7 and the IRC is also fairly active. Also check out the "StarCraft Artificial Intelligence & BWAPI" Facebook group. Most of the fairly well known members are active on there as well.

the various spring games?

https://springrts.com/

>> http://zero-k.info/ >> http://spring1944.net/ >> http://www.moddb.com/games/kernel-panic >> http://nota.machys.net/ >> http://store.steampowered.com/app/291150/ >> and more

Thanks to Blizzard/DeepMind, StarCraft 2 (which has a free edition) will soon have an API for AI research. See my comment on the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099679

It is my understanding that super tux was developed to be used as an alternative for Super Mario, when Nintendo got angry that there were AI competition based around their game.

https://supertux.github.io

www.halite.io is a current competition, not a game humans would play though. There was also a thread on it recently as well.

0 A.D. maybe?

Chess.

Right, any RTS perhaps?

I would love to see games with life long learning. It learns to beat u then and you have to learn to beat it to continue the game.