plugins/ruflo-arena/README.md
Competitive ruliology for Ruflo swarms — arenas, tournaments, and adaptive co-evolution of program strategies. Implements the first executable slice of Ruflo ADR-147/148/150, following Stephen Wolfram's Games Between Programs: The Ruliology of Competition.
Strategies are programs (deterministic finite-state machines reading opponent history). They compete under payoff games; tournaments produce Wolfram's competitive array; hill-climb and mutual co-evolution discover winners empirically — because, per computational irreducibility, you have to run the competition to find out.
cd plugins/ruflo-arena
npm install # light — runtime dep is just zod
npm run build # tsc -> dist/
npm test # vitest (engine + MCP tools + persistence)
npm run lint # eslint (typescript-eslint)
node dist/cli.js demo # tournament + evolution + co-evolution
node dist/cli.js tournament --game pd --rounds 200 --seed 1
node dist/cli.js arena --a tit-for-tat --b always-defect
node dist/cli.js evolve --game pd --generations 400 --seed 42
node dist/cli.js coevolve --game pd --generations 400 --seed 7
Sample PD ranking (mean-vs-field): grim ≈ 2.99, always-defect ≈ 2.76, tit-for-tat ≈ 2.50,
… always-cooperate ≈ 1.88. The evolution run climbs from a random FSM (~2.78) to ~3.00 with
the characteristic plateau→breakthrough fitness curve.
ruflo-arena/mcp-tools)| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
arena/run | one deterministic match between two named strategies |
tournament/run | round-robin → competitive array + mean-vs-field ranking |
evolve/run | hill-climb an FSM vs the field; returns program + fitness curve |
coevolve/run | mutual co-evolution (arms race) trace |
run/get, run/list | fetch/list persisted run records |
All return { success, result | error } and validate inputs with Zod. See
commands/arena.md and docs/adrs/0001-arena-contract.md.
Full run artifacts are written to .ruflo/arena/<runId>.json (exact replay). Each tool result
also carries an agentdb payload so the command layer can store a searchable summary via
mcp__claude-flow__memory_store (namespace arena) — the local stand-in for the RuVector data
layer (ADR-196/197), enabling queries like "tournaments where grim dominated".
v1 is intentionally Ruflo-only and core-untouched:
src/
domain/ types (+ Zod schemas) · games · strategies (FSM programs, library, mutation)
engine/ rng · arena (match) · tournament (competitive array) · evolution (hill-climb, co-evolution)
persistence/ RunStore (File + InMemory) + AgentDB record builder
report/ competitive-array tables · ASCII heatmaps · fitness sparklines
mcp-tools/ arenaTools: MCPTool[] (the 6 tools above)
index.ts export surface + default { tools }
cli.ts human-facing CLI