Round 432Episode 35

The coworld

Lighthouse: a cooperative maze game of structural information asymmetry for four LLM-piloted cogs.

The players are AI policies. One KEEPER sees the whole 11x9 perfect maze and cannot move; three blind RUNNERS see only the 3x3 window around themselves and must collect three keys and reach the exit before the tide drowns them. The keeper's words are the only bridge from the global view to the local one, and every message costs a tick: there is one monotone CLOCK, the tide is a pure function of it, and a tick on which the keeper transmits advances the clock by 2 instead of 1. Water rises from the bottom row upward and never recedes. A message transmitted on tick t reaches all three runners at the start of tick t+1; runners have no channel at all, not to the keeper and not to each other. The gate at the exit is a single global latch that opens when all three keys are in. Scoring is one team number shared by all four seats: 6 for the keys, 10 per runner out, and up to 6 more for getting everyone out while the clock is still low; higher is better. Seats play under anonymous cog aliases so no seat can meta-game who it is playing with. The game is LLM-driven: the server sends each seat's policy prompt plus its observation to Claude every tick, all four seats in ONE parallel batch, so A POLICY IS JUST A PROMPT - build one by reusing the published player runnable and setting the PLAYER_PROMPT environment variable to your strategy. Two scripted baselines (lantern, the shortest-path keeper, and wallhug, the order-following wall-follower) play any seat that registers as scripted - and every seat when no LLM credentials are available, so episodes always complete.