Claude Haiku 5.5

Written by Claude (drafted by Sonnet 5.5, checked by Opus 5.5) from the run's own logs (events.jsonl, episode.json, results.json, interview.md); it is a reading of the run, not part of its score.

• Model: Claude Haiku 5.5 (claude-haiku-5-5) on Anthropic's API, reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
• Benchmark: The Sinkhole construction (no arms), version 1.7.3 (commit e0e0eb4), from the save the human reference game on this map started from; 45 min of game time at speed 40, the length of the person's game (44 min 58 s); no playbook; waits played fast. Weapons and armour in store count nothing toward net worth; sold at a marketplace, they bring their gold.
• Run 70f31043, series 20261018T183932-e619a688, 2026-10-18, host on the game machine: Haiku's game on this benchmark, a fresh series with no memory of its others. Its weapons-counted pair is its 1.7.1 game (run 7afa7fa4, series 20261015T132727-8abdde61, host on a Mac); its Sinkhole game from an earlier round is run 67219133 (1.6.2). This game counts on the website's leaderboard.

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,700 game seconds. Net worth grew by 6,048 over leaving the game alone, 15.3% of the person's 39,436, against 9,909 (25.1%) in the 1.7.1 game. By the website's formula (80% net worth, 10% each population and popularity; shares from doing nothing to the person; net-worth share clipped to −1..2) the score is 23.8 (this game counts on the website's leaderboard): 12.27 points for net worth, 1.55 for 82 people, 10.00 for popularity 100. On the 1.7.1 round's scale it would stand eighth of eleven, between Haiku's own 26.3 and Claude Fable 5.1's 23.1; on the 1.6.2 round's, between GPT-6 Luna (25.5) and Kimi K3 (21.1). Those games counted weapons.

Of the 8,243, 5,244 (64%) is 228 iron from fourteen mines, 2,060 is gold, 364 is 52 stone from one quarry, 272 is 68 apples, 197 is wood and 106 is 9 ale and 2 hops. The town ended with every hovel full, 21 idle peasants and no taxes.

How the game went

Times are the game clock when a call began, read from the recording (the run clock in the observations reads a few seconds later).

0 to 7 minutes: wood, orchards, a housing stall. The first build call (0:01) placed two woodcutters at the grove 39 tiles from the keep and two hovels, and took 60 game seconds; two orchards followed at 1:19. Housing stood at 26 from 1:01 to 6:46, and the population filled it at 2:36 with 21 idle. At 4:17 it wrote that jobs, not housing, were the bottleneck (26 people, 26 places, 20 idle; arrivals stop at 24). Two hovels went down at 6:30.

7 to 25 minutes: iron mines in twos. The first mine came at 7:36 (the retry moved it 4 tiles; two orchards taken from a hovel search were refused). Food fell to 17 by 10:16; the marketplace came at 10:17 and 40 apples were bought at 12:01. Mines followed at 11:05, 12:37, 14:45, 16:18, 20:07 and 23:39 (four), 13 standing by 25:00. Hovels took housing to 66 (13:56) and 82 (19:04); a hops farm and brewery came at 21:13, a quarry and ox tether at 22:27. The context was compacted at 11:58 and 25:00.

25 to 33 minutes: jobs for 24 idle peasants. The 14th and last mine went down at 25:27, after an in-view search that listed one site; then woodcutters (27:18, 33:01), orchards (28:57) and dairy farms (31:09). At 31:09 it skipped a second quarry (two sites listed at 30:23), citing erratic deliveries and scarce tethers. At 33:01 its reasoning put a mine at about 14 net worth a minute against about 3 for a woodcutter, and it placed two woodcutters; the 1.7.1 game placed three mines at that minute.

33 to 45 minutes: waiting. expand_storage found no free ground (35:02); planks were sold at 36:54 and 41:44; the rest was waits of 90 to 180 seconds.

Each column is the last recorded frame at or before that minute (the 1.7.1 rows use the same clock). Before the End column the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; ale and hops (up to 106) are left out. Popularity read 100 in all 42 observations, which also read tax level 3 (no taxes); idle peasants stood at 24 in every reading from 7:33 to 31:09 but one (21 at 13:55), and at 21 from 35:01.

Weapons

It left them alone. It built no armory or weapon workshop, sold and held no weapon, and none of its 99 tool calls was a set_workshop. Its opening reply says weapons and armour add nothing in the armory, "so I will avoid them"; none of its 46 reasoning blocks or its two handoffs mentions them again, and the rule's other half, that sold weapons bring their gold, never came up. It built none in its other two no-arms games either (runs 8d8afa2d and 45c5de42).

The 1.7.1 game made them. Its plan ended with "workshops feeding an armory once iron and wood are steady", and at 18:56 it weighed a sword (30) against iron (23). A fletcher's workshop (21:03), the armory (22:01), a second fletcher's and a blacksmith's (28:00, 28:15) and a poleturner's (31:20) made 6 swords, 8 bows and 7 spears, worth 180, 120 and 70: 370 in all, 3.1% of that game's 12,104. The workshops cost 500 gold (the recording's gold drops agree) and 70 wood, the armory 5 wood, and the weapons used about 6 iron and 23 wood (prompt/game-mechanics.md): about 740 spent for 370 of stock. Under this game's rule those 370 would count nothing, and the 1.7.1 game would stand at 11,734 and 25.5 points: the rule is 0.75 of the 2.5 points between the two scores. This game's iron stayed iron (228), its wood was built with or sold, and its peasants stayed idle (21 at the end, against 8).

Beside its other games and the other models

The 2.5 points between the scores are net worth −7.83 (iron −4.53, gold −1.78, apples −1.17, weapons −0.75, wood −0.28, stone +0.45, ale and hops +0.22), population +0.16 and popularity +5.20.

Iron is 58% of the net worth gap. It had 14 mines and one quarry against 18 and none, and its mines went down later (the first at 7:36 against 3:14; 4 placed by 12:37 against 7 by 12:45) and stopped at 14, while the 1.7.1 game added four more at 31:20 and 33:01, the last three from its seventh iron search (this game ran four, the last at 25:17). The iron gap was 41 at 25 minutes and 97 at the end. This game's mines stood 69 tiles from the keep on average (straight line) against 57 (four at 85 or more, none in the 1.7.1 game); the readouts show 0.7 iron a mine a minute at the last reading against 0.8, but not per mine, so distance is not shown to be the cause.

Gold is 23%. The 1.7.1 game made eight set_tax calls and took in about 1,840 gold (the recording's gold rises, less 100 for planks sold); this game took none, so its gold is 2,000, less 320 for apples, plus 380 from planks. The 1.7.1 game also spent 500 on workshops, 460 at the market and 42 on a bribe. Popularity was the price: 48 at the end there (lowest 44, at 37:27), 100 in every frame here, worth 5.2 points against 3.7 for the taxes' gold. Apples and wood are 19%: 13 orchards and 3 dairy farms for 74 people there, 11 orchards and 5 dairy farms for 82 here.

Version and host. 1.7.2 limited the retry of a blocked placement to the footprint's side plus one tile (12 tiles before) and kept room beside the stockpile for expand_storage; 1.7.3 added the no-arms rule and fixed a compaction retry that neither game's compactions used. Here one mine moved 4 tiles (the 1.7.1 game moved two, 4 and 6), three placements were refused for wrong ground, and expand_storage found no room at 35:02. The opening plans differ: the 1.7.1 plan raised taxes "for steady gold"; this one kept them at none or low. The 1.7.1 game ran with the host on a Mac and this one on the game machine; building took 13.8 game seconds a building on both (below). Most of the gap is what the model built and taxed, but one pair cannot separate that from version, host or chance.

The other models. The 1.7.1 round's other nine games held weapons worth 450 to 1,530. Haiku's no-arms score rose from 23.0 to 26.9 on Oasis by the Sea and fell from 18.9 to 15.6 on Large Barren Desert (against 1.7.3 weapons-counted games); here it fell from 26.3 to 23.8 (against a 1.7.1 game).

What held it back

• A slow start. Housing stood at 26 until 6:46; the first mine came 4 min 22 s after the 1.7.1 game's, and the town held 24 iron at 20 minutes against 53.
• Iron stopped at 14. After 25:17 it made no iron search, with 24 idle peasants, 67 to 325 wood and at least 1,680 gold, and built woodcutters, orchards and dairy farms instead.
• No income, no building at the end. Gold stood at 1,680 from 12:17 to 37:03 and finished at 2,060, a quarter of the net worth; its logged reasoning never mentions taxes after the opening plan. Nothing was built after 33:01, in 11 and a half minutes with 125 to 325 wood. At 32:29 it judged hovels useless at 82 of 82 places; with 21 to 23 idle, the cap of 24 would have admitted 1 to 3 more.
• One quarry. It delivered 8 stone about every 4 minutes from 28:57: 32 in all, 224 of net worth.
• Storage. The stockpile read no empty pile at 41:44; the one expand_storage (35:02) found no room.

What worked

• Iron: fourteen mines delivering about 10 a minute at the end, 64% of the net worth.
• Food and popularity: popularity 100 in all 9,940 recorded frames; food never under 15 (11:19); one person lost (21:31); apples bought once, at 12:01.
• Reading the town: inspect_building answered two doubts (2:38, 25:03), and it sold planks as soon as the stockpile notice appeared. All 55 placements reported as placed are in the final count; three were refused, no call was.

Market

It bought 40 apples at 12:01 (320 gold; its reasoning that turn spoke of 25 meat for 200), losing 160 of net worth against the sell price (8 to buy, 4 to sell). It sold planks at 36:54 and 41:44. Each reply says 100 planks for 100 gold; the recording shows 190 planks and 190 gold each time (wood 325 to 135 with gold 1,680 to 1,870; wood 315 to 125 with gold 1,870 to 2,060), in clicks of 50 at stocks of 215 to 325 and of 20 at 145 to 175. Net worth is unchanged either way. It never traded iron or ale.

It did not set the marketplace's automatic buying or selling. It made no game_action call; all 319 clicks in the input log fall inside harness tool calls (266 build_structure, 27 market_trade, 13 place_near, 7 expand_storage, 6 inspect_building). The game reference in its prompt describes both settings; nothing it wrote mentions them. The 1.7.1 game made no game_action call either.

Cost and speed

54 turns, 99 tool calls (35 wait_and_observe, 27 find_sites, 23 build_structure, 3 market_trade, 11 others), 3.03 million tokens and $0.058 at Anthropic's list prices ($0.10 per million input, $0.50 output, $0.01 cache read, $0.125 cache write): preparation $0.004, play $0.051, compaction $0.003. The interview added about $0.001, with 59,000 of its 61,594 tokens read from the cache. The agent run took 33.3 real minutes, 5.7 waiting for the model (54 replies, 6.3 seconds on average, longest 19.1). The 1.7.1 game took 68 turns, 128 calls, $0.073 and 36.9 minutes. All 54 requests read the prompt cache, 96.1% of input tokens.

Both compactions succeeded on the first request: one compaction_usage event each, a text handoff of 2,182 and 2,219 characters, stop reason "stop", 9.9 and 12.1 seconds, no tool-call reply and no text-only retry. They read 72,361 and 71,285 tokens from the cache; the first request after each read 30,978.

Of the 2,700 game seconds the 35 waits took 1,786, the 23 build_structure calls 689, market_trade 51, place_near 33 and inspect_building 22; about 77 passed between calls. The build calls placed 50 buildings (13.8 game seconds each, 2.2 a call) and place_near 5 more. The 1.7.1 game's 24 calls placed 51 in 704 seconds (13.8 each, 2.1 a call) with the host on a Mac: one pair of games, not a rate.

The interview

Haiku put the gap down to population and income: 82 people against 506, 2,060 gold against 39,977, housing that stopped growing, 21 to 24 idle peasants, one food, taxes at none, storage that filled and a quarry that delivered little. Playing again it would put housing and population first, build a wheat, mill and bakery chain and an inn, raise taxes once popularity was 100, and start quarries and iron mines earlier. It praised the status summary, production window and inspect tool, and asked for a signal for idle peasants without jobs.

Against the game these match: 8,243 is a fifth of 41,631; 82 people; taxes at none; 21 to 24 idle; apples and one brewery as its only chain; the quarry's 8 stone a window; gold idle for most of the run. These do not:

• "I sold surplus wood and iron": only wood was sold.
• Taxes "since the person did this", and "the same policy gave them far more income": the person's description in the same message says taxes stayed at none and their bread was sold.
• "My housing never grew past the starting 82": it started at 10 and was 82 from 19:18; the population filled it at 32:28.
• "Storage filled up ... and stopped delivery": no empty pile read at 41:44, but iron kept arriving (30 in the 3 minutes to 41:43), it sold planks that turn, and 2 piles were empty at the end.
• "The until option ... helped": no wait in the run used until.
• "Buying cheap stone or wood": its own replies quote planks at 4 to buy and 1 to sell.

For the harness

• market_trade undercounts large sales. Its replies said 100 units and 100 gold for sales the recording shows as 190 and 190, twice here, and 40 for 100 in the 1.7.1 game (wood 372 to 272, gold 2,251 to 2,351; that game's analysis follows the reply). The stock and gold fields are right, units and goldChange are not, at stocks above about 200.
• Tiles from other buildings' searches. Two orchards came from the 6:30 hovel search's oasis group and a mine from the 10:17 marketplace search's iron group; each was refused with retrySkipped: no_free_spot_nearby and a remedy naming find_sites, which it followed. A second mine from that list, (366, 400), was placed, but its reply carried the refused mine's error text; its first handoff called it uncertain and its second listed it as failed, though it is among the 13 mines standing at 25:03. The logs do not say whether it worked.
• expand_storage at 35:02 found no room where 1.7.2 meant to keep it (its changelog says the rule was not yet tried live); the logs do not say what stood there.
• No provider errors, refused calls or stalled replies. The game saved at the end ("claude haiku 5-5 1-7-3 70f310").