[MichaelDickens]

Previous AI StarCraft tournaments have put an actions-per-minute (APM) cap on the AIs, which prevents them from micro-managing individual units.

[sanderjd]

I think this definitely needs to be the case if this is going to be an interesting research project at all.

Edit: Nevermind, my intuition in this seems to be wrong - someone more knowledgeable about this claims below that computer mechanics are still not as good as a good human's in the SC1 version of this.

[jtolmar]

In SC1 it's trivially easy to make a bot that spams so many actions it prevents your units from functioning properly. In fact it's easy to do accidentally. A lot of my early efforts into making a bot have been trying to find ways to reduce its APM without making it harder to code.

"More actions = better" makes sense because we're used to human players who are using all their actions for something relatively effective and because (I'll assert) they're well below the optimal APM. But the optimal APM is probably something like 1000, not the 10k a bot can easily reach.

[daemin]

So the challenge for the AI would be to figure out which action to do with the limited supply of actions and time.