Dave Churchill, who is heavily involved in the StarCraft AI scene, posted this in the StarCraft AI Facebook group: "Hey everyone, I just wanted to make a quick

Dave Churchill, who is heavily involved in the StarCraft AI scene, posted this in the StarCraft AI Facebook group: "Hey everyone, I just wanted to make a quick statement about this article that was posted in WIRED. If Tom had told me that his intention for this article was to focus on the loss of ANY bot, Facebook or not, I would not have given him the information that I did to write this article. I am normally a huge fan of Tom's AI articles, but I think that this is a shameful clickbait title that focuses on the wrong side of the story. It turns out that there may actually be a bug with how Facebook's serialization library interacted with our tournament environment, causing their strategy selection to not work properly, causing a huge drop in performance for their bot. We will be investigating this over the next few days to see if it was my mistake in setting things up that caused this, or if maybe something as simple as a windows firewall setting to be at fault. Unfortunately with competitions like this, competitors do not have access to our tournament environment / machines to fully 100% test all of their code on, and sometimes issues like this can arise. I appreciate Facebook's effort in this competition and applaud them for actually having the balls to submit an open source bot, knowing the scrutiny they would face if it wasn't already superhuman. It's a real shame that this is what media chooses to focus on. Tom also asked me what time the results would officially be made public so that the article could be released at the same time, but instead the article ended up being published 7am the next morning so everyone could wake up to the headline :( Also the word "quietly" implies some sort of sneaking around on the part of Facebook, when their registration has been publicly visible for months. Note: There is nothing factually incorrect in this article, I just believe its focus is in poor taste, and hurts the SCAI community as a whole, and unfairly singles out a single competitor."