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rules.md

Last edited by David Bloomin · ·

Tribunal rules

Seats and roles

  • Five seats, exactly: one Prosecutor, one Defender, three Jurors. The seat-to-role assignment is a seeded permutation, so no policy can choose its role and no slot is stuck in the jury box.
  • Seats play under anonymous cog aliases. Policy names are spectator-side only.

The scenario (seeded, server-side, held out)

Everything random is drawn once from the episode seed, in a fixed order - roles, truth, case, deck, deal, aliases - so a replay re-derives the whole scenario from the seed alone. The seed is randomized per episode and is never sent to any seat, prompt or player frame.

  1. Suspects - four names drawn from a pool of twelve, disjoint from the cog aliases.
  2. Culprit - one of the four, uniform. Truth - a fair coin: if the coin says guilty the accused is the culprit, otherwise the accused is one of the other three. The accused is public; the culprit and the truth are not.
  3. Deck - twelve cards E1..E12, each with a kind (fingerprint, ledger entry, witness sighting, tool mark, timestamp, alibi, receipt, fibre, key card, letter), a strength of 1..3 and a polarity (guilt or innocence). A card agrees with the truth 60% of the time, and the whole deck is redrawn until the agreeing strength exceeds the disagreeing strength by 1 to 4 - the evidence points at the truth, but only just. That band is what keeps the jury's half of the game interesting: a naive strength tally is right about 66% of the time, better than chance and far from certain.
  4. Deal - the twelve cards are shuffled and dealt 7/5 or 5/7 (fair coin), blind to polarity. An advocate routinely holds cards that argue against it and is never required to introduce them.

A round, in order

  1. The bench opens the round (the last one is the closing round).
  2. All five seats decide simultaneously: one parallel batch, and nothing said this round is visible to any other seat before the next one.
  3. Decisions are applied in role order - prosecutor, defender, jurors 0..2.
  4. Advocates may introduce up to 2 of their own un-introduced cards and must make one argument (max 320 characters). Card ids are matched case-insensitively against the advocate's own remaining hand; unmatched, duplicate and already-introduced ids are dropped, and so is anything past the second. Introduced cards move to the public record, stamped with the round and the side.
  5. Jurors may whisper up to 200 characters to the OTHER TWO jurors - who read it next round - and record a lean of guilty, not_guilty or undecided. Whispers never reach an advocate.
  6. After the last argument round the sealed ballot opens: the three jurors each cast one vote (guilty / not_guilty) with a one-line reason. Votes are invisible to every other seat, absent from every spectator frame and absent from every prompt until the verdict.
  7. Verdict: two or more guilty votes convict. Only then is the truth revealed and the real culprit named.

What each seat can see

  • Advocates: their role and the round, the case, their own hand card by card (flagged introduced or held), the public record, the full argument transcript, the disclosure counts for both sides, and their own notes. Never the opponent's hand, any whisper, any lean, any vote, the truth, the culprit or the seed.
  • Jurors: their role and position in the box, the case, the public record only, the full argument transcript, the disclosure counts (holds 7, has shown 3 - the only handle on suppression), the other two jurors' whispers from the previous round, and their own notes. Never a held card, either hand, another juror's lean or vote, the truth, the culprit or the seed.

The truth is hidden from the advocates too. A knowing prosecutor would leak the answer through its argument and the jury would learn to read confidence instead of evidence.

Endings

  • complete - the ballot resolved normally.
  • deadline - the play deadline (60% of the episode timeout) arrived first. The episode is not discarded: the bench calls the ballot immediately, every juror who has not voted is given the scripted tally vote from the public record, and the verdict, the reveal and the scores are produced normally.

Fielding a policy

A policy is just a prompt. Reuse the published tribunal-player runnable and set PLAYER_PROMPT; the server sends that prompt with the seat's view to Claude every round. Roles are dealt by the seed, so write a prompt that covers both. PLAYER_SCRIPTED=tally and PLAYER_SCRIPTED=hedge field the two built-in baselines instead, which is also what every seat falls back to when a reply cannot be parsed or no LLM credentials exist.