Optional headless mode for all SC2 client instances that are being controlled by a bot as opposed to being controlled by a human (and similarly for a bot while it is processing a replay file). By "headless", I mean avoiding rendering for graphical display on a monitor, and avoiding any other resource utilization (CPU/memory/disk etc) that is unnecessary for such a system - I am not talking about the virtual "vision-based" interface that the bot may or may not have subscribed to (presumably it is built from the game state rather than built from the output of graphical rendering). E.g. if a bot is running on PC 1 against a human that is using PC 2, the bot on PC 1 can run optionally in headless mode. It might be a good idea to get support for this in early rather than adding it later. A use case is to avoid all unnecessary graphical rendering when you just want your bot to play as many games as possible 24x7 in an automated training/tournament system. This should speed up the number of games a bot can play per hour a lot, because rendering is so expensive computationally (in terms of GPU and memory at least). I would rather use my GPUs as much as possible for machine learning computations rather than for unnecessary graphics, or I might want to be able to run it on a system that doesn't need a fancy GPU :) Currently, in Brood War bots using BWAPI, the main performance bottleneck (i.e. frame rate bottleneck) in multiplayer (LAN) games in AIIDE/CIG tournaments is graphically rendering frames - you can only skip rendering 255 out of every 256 frames and that one frame per 256 can make all the difference. I expect the same problem would happen in SC2, especially if no support for skipping rendering frames is added for SC2(?).

Ability to run multiple games on the same OS instance concurrently (e.g. play four AI-vs-AI games concurrently) so we do not have to mess about setting up one virtual machine dedicated to each and every individual bot. Each OS instance requires a lot of disk and memory etc overheads that I would rather avoid.

Support for running on Linux-based OS'es if it doesn't already (or if you think it does already, at least verify it).

Preferably no internet access/DRM phoning home required (while training or running tournaments anyway), to avoid potential performance bottlenecks waiting for internet I/O to begin/end games or forcefully uploading replays to Blizzard etc. I am not sure whether "Initially restricted to offline games." covers this. I'm not sure whether Blizzard is worried about piracy for AI vs AI or AI vs Human games though.

A fully automated training/tournament management system that can be set up in any environment (e.g. all on one PC or a set of PCs or VMs - not just on Blizzard servers), similar to StarcraftAITournamentManager which is used for Brood War BWAPI bot tournaments like AIIDE and CIG. Currently it works in round robin fashion for a fixed pool of bots, but something similar to SSCAIT's system could be supported for matching up bots and maps in a probabilistic fashion.

I suggest publishing rules about where and how persistent file I/O should be implemented (for bot log files etc and data used for inter-game learning), because the rules need to be clear for tournaments that are run on hosted environments. For example, see http://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/starcraftaicomp/rules.shtml for the rules used in AIIDE and CIG tournaments for Brood War.

Hi, Chris Coxe, author of the Brood War bot ZZZKBot here. Really exciting news! It's great that Blizzard (with DeepMind) is adding API support for people wanting to write bots. It's just a pity nothing similar has been announced for Brood War too (yet? I can hope...). Here are my initial thoughts on some feature suggestions for SC2. I realize it is still very early days though.On a separate note, I know APM has been mentioned, but I am not sure whether response time has been mentioned. Response time is a different concept than APM, i.e. response time is a human's typical delay between sensory stimulus and any physical response, like the delay before pulling your hand away when burning it on a hot stove. I am not sure whether Blizzard/DeepMind have considered limiting response time to a more human like level somehow, i.e. forcefully imposing some kind of delay between when game state information is available and when actions involving that game state are allowed to be executed, e.g. after selecting my entire army via the hotkey then moving the camera across the screen to a nuclear launch alert, imposing a small delay before being allowed to attack the enemy ghost rather than simply being allowed to focus-fire it on the same frame it becomes visible.Humans also use sound alerts. So I suppose humans will have at least one advantage over bots unless some kind of alerting system is implemented for sound triggers, if nothing else :) jk