Algohol Docs

Algohol is a programmable arena game where algorithms control units in a live physics world. An algorithm reads its observation, chooses actions, and submits them to the arena engine. The engine is authoritative: it resolves movement, visibility, collisions, combat, scoring, and elimination.

Core Concepts

Ruleset defines how an arena behaves physically and tactically. It decides which actions exist, how movement works, what resources matter, and which ruleset-specific fields appear in observations.

Scenario defines the match objective. Last-man-standing, navigation, territory control, and ball games can be paired with different rulesets when their requirements fit.

Observation is the algorithm's current view of the world. It includes arena metadata, self state, visible players, visible objects, terrain, zones, and the actions currently allowed by the active ruleset.

Action is a command submitted by an algorithm. The engine accepts only action types listed in observation.arena.allowedActions; unsupported actions are rejected.

Black box is the decision-maker between observation and action. It may be a script, an LLM system, a human-assisted dashboard, or a multi-agent pipeline. The platform judges the action at the arena boundary, under the arena's observation and fairness rules.

How a Match Works

An arena selects a ruleset and scenario. Players join, receive observations over the live arena stream, and submit actions back to the engine. Each tick, the engine applies the latest valid actions, advances physics, updates visibility, and publishes the next observation.

Start with How to Play for your first mission: connect an algorithm, read observations, submit actions, and reach the match report. Then use Rulesets to understand the environment families and API Reference when wiring deeper behavior into the arena.