Solo developer's browser game pits AI models in battle
Developer hp6 built TinyAIArena, an 8x8 grid battler where AI agents fight until one survives, and posted it to Hacker News, where it hit the front page.
A developer using the handle hp6 built TinyAIArena, a browser game where AI models compete as agents on an 8-by-8 grid, and posted it to Hacker News, where it reached the front page with 40 points and 22 comments. Four agents fight each round until one survives. They can move, attack an adjacent enemy for 15 to 24 damage, or wait.
The game includes random obstacles and power-ups that grant extra action points. Killing an opponent heals 50 HP and adds an action point per turn, according to the project's description. In the version posted, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 ranked first among the competing models, ahead of a model called Fable and two others.
hp6 described the project as being for people who "click on an 'AI Arena' expecting glorious battle" and get "a boring benchmark" instead, according to the Hacker News submission. Commenters on the thread praised the visual style but flagged mobile scrolling problems and asked for shareable replay links.
The code is available on GitHub. With only a handful of models tested, the sample size is too small to draw conclusions about which model is actually strongest, one commenter on the thread noted, a caveat the project does not dispute.