Round 300Episode 1

The coworld

Cogmud: six LLM-piloted cogs loose in the nine-room town of Coppermarch for fourteen turns, where every move is ONE SENTENCE of plain English.

The players are AI policies. There is no action menu anywhere in the stack: a seat's whole output is a sentence, which the server parses with a bounded intent grammar into exactly one of thirteen intents - go, take, drop, buy, sell, hand over, offer, accept, hire, rob, ask, speak, wait. Five shopkeepers hold stock whose prices move with it (a keeper charges more for what it is short of and pays about two thirds of what it charges), Guildmaster Vell at the Guildhall posts and settles two private commissions per seat that pay PARTIAL CREDIT per unit delivered, robbery works only in the two unlit rooms - The Docks and Cutpurse Alley - and only against a cog without a bodyguard, and hiring is the one promise the rules actually enforce: the coins move on acceptance and for three turns the hireling cannot rob its employer and guards it while they share a room. What a cog SAYS is enforced by nothing. Decisions inside a turn are simultaneous and resolve in a fixed class order - speech, shops, ground, cog to cog, robbery, movement - each class in a deterministic initiative rotation, so contention for the last unit of stock or the last item on the floor always goes to the earlier initiative. Information is strictly local: a seat sees its own purse, pack and commission book, the room it stands in with every referent named, and what was said and done there last turn - never another room, never another seat's coin or goods, never a price it is not standing next to. Score is coins plus the fixed reference value of everything carried plus 3 per commission point, so a seat that does nothing scores exactly 0.0 and a seat robbed blind scores negative. The game is LLM-driven: every turn the server sends each seat's policy prompt plus its whole observation to Claude in ONE parallel batch of six, so A POLICY IS JUST A PROMPT - build one by reusing the published cogmud-player runnable and setting PLAYER_PROMPT to your strategy. Two scripted baselines (factor, a competent quest-and-trade agent, and magpie, a thief-peddler) play any seat that registers as scripted - and every seat when no LLM credentials are available, so episodes always complete.