# The promotion gauntlet: how a candidate bot earns its place.

> Every production bot in hexodic survived a tournament against every bot before it — with a statistical bar, not a vibe check.

hexodic's promotion gauntlet in full: what triggers a candidate bot, the whole-pool tournament it must sweep, the Wilson 95% statistical gate, and why losers are discarded.

Canonical HTML: https://hexodic.com/bot-gauntlet
Site index for agents: https://hexodic.com/llms.txt

## What is the bot gauntlet?

The gauntlet is hexodic's promotion system: the tournament a **candidate bot** must sweep before it becomes the production bot. It's the enforcement half of [play-to-train](/play-to-train) — the loop where decisive human wins seed new candidates. The seeding is human; the gauntlet is what keeps the results honest.

## The trigger: a decisive human win

Candidates aren't generated on a schedule. The trigger is a player **beating the production bot decisively** — the system treats that as evidence of an exploitable weakness, locates the pivot ply where the game turned, and generates a candidate variant that accounts for it. No decisive wins, no candidates: the players are the search heuristic.

## The gauntlet itself

A candidate doesn't fight the champion — it fights **everyone**:

- It plays the **entire current agent pool**, not just the bot it hopes to replace.
- Against every single pool member it must win with **statistical significance**, scored by a **Wilson 95% confidence gate** — enough games that the win rate's lower confidence bound clears the bar, so a lucky streak can't sneak a weak candidate through.
- **One failure anywhere ends it.** A candidate that dominates the champion but drops a matchup to an older bot is discarded — regressions against any known style are disqualifying.
- Clear every bar and the candidate is **promoted to production**; it becomes the bot players face, and the next thing a decisive win can dethrone.

## Why so strict?

Because the loop compounds. Every promotion becomes the baseline every future candidate must beat, so a single generous promotion would poison the pool downstream. The Wilson gate makes strength claims *statistical* rather than anecdotal, and the whole-pool sweep makes them *general* rather than style-specific. It's the same reason the game itself ships with measured numbers — a **0.25%** draw rate, **46.38%** first-player win rate, branching of **911 / 1,009 / 665** at half-moves 5 / 10 / 20 — the project's standing rule is that claims get measured or they get labeled.

## What feeds it, and what doesn't

The gauntlet consumes **anonymously recorded completed games** — moves, outcome, and optionally a region-level country tag. No account, no personal data, no neural network training on you; the mechanism is a tournament of classical search agents. The full data inventory is on [how your games help](/how-your-games-help), and where the loop is headed — country-trained bots, clearly labeled vision — is on the [roadmap](/roadmap).

Think you can trigger a candidate? The six-tier ladder ends in a deep-searching expert. [Get hexodic](/#get-hexodic).

## Questions this page answers

- How does a hexodic candidate bot get promoted?
- What is the bot gauntlet in hexodic?