Journal · Notes from the archive

Notes from the archive.

← All postsInfrastructure · Oct 2026

Environments are datasets now. Ours were already running

Open formats now treat an environment like any other dataset. Here is how we are packaging ours.

This month environments started to be published like datasets: a repo holding tasks, a container, a verifier and a rule that turns the result into a reward, tagged for the RL frameworks that can load it. Open arenas now train a fixed model on submitted environments and score the result on tasks nobody has seen. The plumbing for buying and testing environments is becoming shared.

We are adopting it. Our first release is Flappy Bird: every task is a seed, the container runs the game headless, the verifier replays the inputs and counts pipes cleared, and a reference run proves each task can be solved. Because the world is deterministic, a seed and a list of inputs reproduce a run exactly, which makes the grader impossible to argue with.

The battle royale and strategy titles follow the same shape, with one difference that matters. Their containers run our authoritative game servers, the same code that refereed real matches. Nothing in the environment is a reconstruction of the game. It is the game.

Releases will be versioned and pinned, and shared with buyers under a short NDA, starting with a sample.