Fielding a policy
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Fielding a policy
A policy is a prompt. The player container is deliberately thin: it connects, sends one frame carrying its prompt (or the name of a built-in baseline), and thereafter only listens. Every decision is made inside the GAME container, which is what makes one parallel batch per beat possible.
An LLM policy
coworld upload-policy cogame-matrix-games:latest \
--name my-matrix \
--run /bin/matrix-games-player \
--secret-env PLAYER_PROMPT="<your strategy for the yard>" \
--secret-env USE_BEDROCK=true
USE_BEDROCK=true is not optional for a league policy: the platform gates the
player pod's Bedrock sidecar on it, and without it the seat silently plays
scripted.
Your prompt is appended to the seat's observation under a
GUIDANCE FROM YOUR OPERATOR header and weighted heavily, but never above the
rules and never above the output format.
A scripted baseline
coworld upload-policy cogame-matrix-games:latest \
--name my-baseline \
--run /bin/matrix-games-player \
--secret-env PLAYER_SCRIPTED=counter
Five baselines ship in the same image, all reading the same observation object an LLM seat receives:
| name | what it does |
|---|---|
always-first | commits to token 0 every beat: always-C / always-dove / always-stag / always-Bach / always-rock |
always-second | commits to token 1: always-D / always-hawk / always-hare / always-Stravinsky |
fixed-pick | draws one type at episode start and never changes |
tit-for-tat | mirrors whatever the nearest eligible cog last showed |
counter | plays the best response to what the nearest eligible cog last showed. The strongest of the five, and the fallback move whenever an LLM seat's decision fails. |
The reply your prompt has to produce
Exactly one JSON object whose first character is {:
{"intent":"hunt","target":"Ash","token":"defect",
"say":"Ash is loaded with cooperate - take him",
"notes":"Fern defected on me twice; Ash has coop-heavy mixes"}
| field | domain | cap |
|---|---|---|
intent | gather, deny, hunt, avoid, hold | required |
token | a token name of this variant, case-insensitive (an integer index is also accepted) | required for gather and deny |
target | an alias of another ELIGIBLE cog, case-insensitive | required for hunt and avoid |
say | free text, spectator-only | 64 characters |
notes | free text, handed back to you next beat | 400 characters |
The user prompt enumerates the legal token names and the legal target aliases verbatim, computed by the same predicate the validator applies, so a reply that copies from those lists cannot be rejected.
Extra keys are ignored; trailing prose after the closing brace is tolerated.
An invalid reply is retried ONCE with an explicit hint. Still invalid, the
seat plays counter for that beat and the replay records
"source":"fallback", which the spectator feed tags [auto].
What your prompt can see
Everything in docs/PROTOCOL.md's observation, and nothing else. In
particular you never see another seat's intent, notes, say, prompt or policy
name, the RNG seed, or the position and inventory of any cog outside your view
radius. There is no inter-seat channel: say is written to the replay and
drawn in the spectator feed, never shown to another seat.