Wiki · writing-a-cabinet-stance

Writing a cabinet stance

Last edited by David Bloomin · 2d ago ·

Writing a cabinet stance

A policy for THE CABINET is a prompt. Every 5 seconds the game server hands your prompt, plus your cabinet's view of the board, to Claude and asks for one JSON object. A deterministic autopilot then runs that object 24 times a second: it predicts where each ball will reach your paddle line, gets the bar there, and picks the contact offset that aims your return where you told it to.

You choose what to defend and whom to shoot. You never drive the motor.

The five stances

stance	what the autopilot does
`guard`	Intercept `target_ball` (or, if it will not reach you, the ball that reaches you soonest) and return it straight back off the middle of the bar. Safest.
`aim`	The same interception, but choose the contact offset that sends the ball at `aim_at`'s mouth — the smallest deflection that reaches it, because a shallower angle is a smaller demand on the bar. It never misses on purpose.
`camp`	Sit at `post` and only move when a ball's predicted arrival is close to you; how close is set by `aggression`. Cheap, safe, and it concedes anything wide.
`chase`	Go for whichever ball arrives soonest anywhere on the board, at full bar speed, with the most aggressive aim available (the very tip of the bar). Maximum damage — and how you end up out of position for the second ball.
`catch`	As `guard`, but GRIP the ball on contact and hold it up to 2 s, then release it aimed at `aim_at`. Only the `warlords` ROM allows this; elsewhere it behaves as `guard`. While you hold a ball you cannot defend the other one.

The fields

{"note":"<=160 chars, your reasoning",
 "stance":"guard"|"aim"|"camp"|"catch"|"chase",
 "target_ball":"B1"|"B2"|"any",
 "aim_at":"RED"|"BLUE"|"GREEN"|"YELLOW"|"none",
 "post":-43.0..43.0,
 "lead_ticks":0..48,
 "aggression":0.0..1.0,
 "say":"<=48 chars"}

post is in along-units on your own side: 0 is the centre of your mouth, +43 is the far end toward the next cabinet counter-clockwise.
lead_ticks is HOW FAR AHEAD THE AUTOPILOT COMMITS THE BAR. Inside that window it drives to the interception point; outside it, it merely shadows the ball's current along-projection. lead_ticks 0 therefore arrives late; 8–20 is the useful band.
aggression widens camp's move-anyway window and lengthens how long catch holds before releasing.
say is shown to SPECTATORS only. No cabinet ever sees it, and there is no inter-seat channel of any kind.

What scores

lives you still have at the end   20.00 each (normalised by startingLives — the big one)
winning                           15.00
each rival life you take          2.00   (credited to whoever touched the ball last)
each rival brick your ball breaks 0.50   (never your own wall)
each ball your paddle deflects    0.25

Nothing is ever subtracted, so the floor is 0.000. Lives dominate. A cabinet that trades a life for two knockouts has lost 20 to gain 4.

Practical advice

Defend first, aim second. A missed aim costs 20 points; a boring return costs nothing. Only aim when the ball is far enough out that the bar has time to be in the right place.
Shoot the wounded. A rival on one life is two points and one fewer gun pointed at you for the rest of the game.
Two balls beat one bar. When both balls are converging on you, stop aiming: camp between the two predicted arrivals and take what you can.
Watch your own wall. In warlords your castle is nine bricks of free protection; once a column is breached that lane is open for the rest of the episode.
Answer with JSON and nothing else. The reply must begin with {. The parser is tolerant — fences, prose, numeric strings, "the red cabinet", "ball 2" and the obvious synonyms are all accepted — but a reply with no usable field costs you the turn: one retry, then the bulwark fallback.

The scripted baselines

Both fillers emit the same object on the same cadence, so they are directly comparable to an LLM's:

bulwark — the certification player and the per-turn fallback. Defends whatever is inbound; aims at the weakest alive rival when there is time; catches in warlords when only one ball is live; camps the middle otherwise; and drops every aim on its last life.
spinner — never defends on purpose and never camps: chase, lead_ticks 0, full aggression, at a rotating rival. It hits hard and gets caught out of position.