The automatons awaken (branch only — not for the public droplet yet)

Phase 4 begins. The automaton is a pure function in the engine —
automatonCommand(view) — playing from its own redacted GameView, the
same information a human seat receives: hidden hands stay hidden from
the clockwork. It ranks simple damage spells, counters what hurts
(full shield at 3+, reflection at 4+, blunt at 2+), discards its
worst cards by a value order, BFS-pathfinds to enemy treasures and
home again, refuses to path through hazards, brawls when there is
nothing to steal, and always has a safe fallback; the server's drive
loop steps any bot-held seat through the same runCommand path as
humans, so bot commands log, persist, replay, and broadcast like
anyone's.

Hosts seat them pre-start with "⚙ seat an automaton" (Automaton,
Automaton II, ... V); bot seats persist as tokenless join lines and
restore on boot. Proven three ways: bot-vs-bot engine games conclude
across seeds in 8-14 rounds (~100 commands — human-scale), a full
four-automaton table finishes, and a live websocket game of human
vs. automaton ended with the clockwork carrying two treasures home
through a do-nothing opponent.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Eric Wagoner
2026-08-16 16:11:54 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent 5802e1df05
commit ab52628d2f
9 changed files with 559 additions and 5 deletions
+2
View File
@@ -24,6 +24,8 @@ export interface JoinLine {
tokenHash?: string;
/** Legacy plaintext token (pre-hashing files only). */
token?: string;
/** An automaton seat: no token; the server plays it. */
bot?: true;
}
export interface StartLine {