Victory-condition checks performed against the sixteen instructed

The essay reports: against an instruction to check rival victory progress every twenty turns, models managed between four and ten checks in a 330-turn game rather than the roughly sixteen expected.

FindingLimited evidence

Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review

Compared the reported four to ten checks per 330-turn game against an approximately sixteen-check instruction 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 229: four to ten checks per 330-turn game against an approximately sixteen-check instruction. 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 per-game check counts, treatment of shorter games and classification of alternative observations 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

4 to 10

Measured: victory checks performed
Of: all models in the pilot
Sample: not recorded
Observed: 2026-06-22

The essay reports four to ten checks over a 330-turn game. Sixteen is the rounded-down count of twenty-turn intervals, not a separately observed control group. The review did not recover a per-game count table, the range’s underlying sample or rules for classifying indirect observations as checks.

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

Ideas

The sensorium effect
Subject

Record history

Catalogue source: knowledge/findings/victory-checks-performed.md

Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25