Games reaching an ending without the external diary
The essay reports: only twenty-one per cent of games reached an ending when the agent had no external memory to read back after its context compacted.
FindingSources & confidence: Limited evidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Compared the reported 21% of no-diary games reaching an ending with the local essay and available analysis/code; no reproduction.
- Local essay: i-gave-an-ai-a-civilization
Local content/posts/i-gave-an-ai-a-civilization.mdx around line 165: 21% of no-diary games reaching an ending. The canonical URL identifies the essay; the checked artifact was the local file.
- civ6-mcp: cross-game analysis
Local file checked: qualitative analysis of early games; does not reproduce the seven published aggregate measurements.
What this check doesn’t establish
- The numeric result is a transcription of the author’s report, not independently verified experimental evidence.
- The number of no-diary trials, terminal-state criteria and matched with-diary comparison are missing.
- No games or aggregate analysis were rerun.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
21%
- Measured
- games completed
- Of
- games run without an external diary, as reported in the essay
- Sample
- not recorded
- Observed
- 2026-06-22
The essay reports 21% completion without the diary. The separate 23-game clean pilot cannot safely be used as the denominator of this earlier or differently configured condition. No trial table or matched comparison was recovered, so this record does not establish a causal effect size for external memory.
The publication date is retained in observed because no experiment date is documented here. Confidence concerns this reported result; the underlying experiment has not been independently verified.
In the essays
- I Gave an AI a Civilization to Run. It Built a Nuke.
Read the essay
Projects
- CivBench
Produced by
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/findings/games-completed-without-diary.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25