# Brood War Bench

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Brood War Bench and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A StarCraft Brood War bot benchmark people praise for measuring real-world AI speed and skill, with replays and runnable games.

## Why people recommend it

- Real-world task as AI benchmark (3 comments): "This is a very interesting benchmark, and I think it has a lot of potential to make the speed of a model quantifiable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774166)) "I like this as a concept - taking a very real world task and checking whether it works." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774056)) "This is a great idea for a benchmark." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769774))
- Replays viewable and runnable games online (2 comments): "Was very impressed that it was a replay playing that you can scroll around in and select units." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773638)) "you can run your own games on bw.swerdlow.dev" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771700))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Artificial Analysis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/artificial-analysis.md): 62 recommend
- [LMArena](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lmarena.md): 39 recommend
- [ARC-AGI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/arc-agi-3.md): 22 recommend
- [OCR Arena](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ocr-arena.md): 11 recommend
- [Bullshit Benchmark](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bullshit-benchmark.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Brood War Bench", https://hackerapproved.com/p/brood-war-bench/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).