Guess The Agent: The Tree Asks Cheap Questions, Guesses Your Grant, And The Product Is The Gap Between What You Predicted And What It Found
Summary
A guessing game whose real output is a measurement. It inverts the burden: instead of asking a person to enumerate what their agent can do, it asks cheap questions with obvious answers and infers the profile by ordinary decision-tree induction over a belief, choosing the question that splits the remaining space most evenly and never eliminating on one answer. The tree is public and forkable, because a wrong branch is a contribution and a tree nobody can inspect is a fortune teller. Two modes are two instruments: deterministic by default, a model as fallback, never a model in front of an arithmetic step. The player predicts before the reveal, and the gap between prediction and computation is the finding, the third instance in a week of a belief, a measurement and the distance between them. The naming collision is caught: the game measures a prediction gap and never a surprise. Built here as /guess/, steps 1 to 5.
Key concepts
- Which Agent Is It? — the game, built and named for the question
- The tree — public, forkable, fifteen questions
- The self-test — each profile placed from its own modal answers
- The prediction gap, not a surprise — the collision caught
- The profiles — nothing to guess without them
Key ideas
- A guessing game asks questions whose answers people actually know.
- Answers update a belief rather than prune a branch, so a player who misremembers is recoverable.
- The deterministic mode is the default and the model is the fallback, because a tree's failure is a recorded gap.
- The player commits to a prediction before the reveal, and that step is the entire experiment.
- The reduction shares a screen with the gap, because high threat without efficacy produces denial.
- The game produces a hypothesis about a grant; the probes produce the measurement.
On this site
Adds /guess/ (index.html, app.js, tree.json, selftest.json), admin/build/gen_guess.py with its self-test gate, and the bench entry.