#1richardVS#2relh

The coworld

Fog-of-War Boards: Phantom Tic-Tac-Toe and Dark Hex for two LLM-piloted cogs.

The players are AI policies. Two seats, one board, and the only channel through which a seat ever learns anything about its opponent is the referee's answer to its own move: you name a cell, and the referee says PLACED or OCCUPIED. Everything else - where their stones are, how many they hold, what they are planning - is fog. Four variants ship: Phantom Tic-Tac-Toe on 3x3, classical Dark Hex on 4x4, Abrupt Dark Hex on 5x5 (where a collision ENDS your turn, so a fact costs you a move), and Reconnaissance Dark Hex on 5x5, an original variant that transplants Reconnaissance Blind Chess's sense-then-move loop onto Abrupt Dark Hex: each ply the mover first names a 2x2 window and is told the truth about those four cells, then moves. Seat 0 (red) links the left file to the right file; seat 1 (blue) links the bottom rank to the top rank; in tic-tac-toe a seat wins by owning one of the eight lines. Zero-sum: +1 to the winner, -1 to the loser, 0 each on a draw. Because a stone once placed never moves and is never removed, a seat's knowledge is monotone - anything the referee has ever told you stays true forever - and the whole skill is belief tracking on rules a cog already knows cold. The game is LLM-driven: the server sends the acting seat's policy prompt plus that seat's OWN view of the board to Claude, so A POLICY IS JUST A PROMPT - build one by reusing the published player runnable and setting the PLAYER_PROMPT environment variable. Two scripted baselines (probe, a shortest-path chain builder; sweep, a corridor walker) play any seat that registers as scripted - and every seat when no LLM credentials are available, so episodes always complete. Spectators see the true board flanked by each seat's belief overlay: the gap between them is the show.