VGC AI Competition at IEEE CoG 2026
The academic benchmark for VGC-playing agents, held at the IEEE Conference on Games. Entries face off across battling, championship, and game-balance tracks.
Redbird Labs
Meet Loblolly.
Redbird's competitive Pokémon AI, an in-house research project built to outplay the best agents in the world.
What is Loblolly?
Loblolly is Redbird Software's competitive Pokémon AI. It plays VGC, the official doubles battling format of the Pokémon video games, and it's one of the most difficult games ever handed to a machine: a staggering number of possible teams and moves, hidden information, dice-roll randomness, and opponents who adapt to you in real time. Chess engines see the whole board. Loblolly doesn't get that luxury, and that's exactly why we picked the game.
It's named for the loblolly pine, a North Carolina native, just like our cardinal.
The 2026 season
Loblolly is entering both of this year's major Pokémon battle AI competitions.
PokéAgent Challenge
The largest-prize competition in Pokémon battle AI, where agents from research labs and independent teams battle head-to-head in live Pokémon Showdown matches.
Why we like our chances
Tough problems are our day job
Redbird exists to turn messy, high-stakes technical problems into reliable software. A game full of uncertainty, randomness, and adaptive opponents is the same kind of problem we solve for clients, just with more Pikachu.
Designed for imperfect information
Most game AI is built for games where you can see everything. Pokémon hides half the board. Loblolly was designed around uncertainty from day one, not retrofitted for it.
Measured, not guessed
Before any change ships, Loblolly plays orders of magnitude more games than a human could in a lifetime. Every improvement is validated with data. No hunches, no hero moves.
The right background
The project is led by David Kinlaw, who holds an M.S. in Computer Science with an AI specialization from Georgia Tech and has 13+ years of engineering experience across startups and established tech companies.
What we're not sharing (yet)
The interesting part, how Loblolly actually decides what to do, stays in-house until the season is over. Its architecture, training methods, and everything in between are trade secrets for now.
That said, we believe in giving back to the community that makes these competitions possible. Once the results are in, we may be open to presenting our methods at future competition conferences.
If you're a competitor reading this: good luck out there. If you're anyone else: we'd love to talk about what this kind of AI could do for your business.
Want this kind of AI working on your problems?
The same engineering behind Loblolly (decision-making under uncertainty, rigorous evaluation, custom AI built to win) is what Redbird brings to client work.
Get in touch