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"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

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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.
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

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