A strategy game about the AI race where you can't verify alignment

Details

External ID

48804144

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

A strategy game about the AI race where you can't verify alignment

Website domain

criticalwindow.org

Launched

July 6, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

6

Upvotes percentile

0.2873357228195938

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I made a strategy game where you play the US or China through the AI race, 2026 to 2030, sixteen quarterly turns in the browser. One run takes about half an hour.At the start, the game seals two dice you never get to see. Inside: how hard alignment really is, and how fast takeoff compounds. You get eval reports, but only as ranges, and they flatter you most exactly when your systems are least aligned. At the end you get a debrief which shows what your evals said each quarter and also what was actually true. I lost every run I played myself so far.Every number in the game is source-backed or a labeled design choice. Some of them are wrong somewhere. There is an issue template for challenging a number with a better source, and the better source wins.No accounts, no tracking, no server, works offline after first load. AGPL, nonprofit. Cards and parameters are plain JSON. Contribution is possible without writing code. Would like to have your thoughts if it is fun to play, how you like it and what you would improve. Any feedback is welcome and most importantly, if we got something badly wrong.Code: https://github.com/chipmates/criticalwindow

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