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Show HN: Chip's Challenge (1992), rebuilt for the web (claudes-challenge.vercel.app)
2 points by kenblum 7 days ago
Author here. Remember Chip's Challenge? The 1992 Windows one from the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. I wanted to play it again so I ported it to the browser. Well, Claude did. I was too lazy to write the code, so I made a rule that I wouldn't write any and just bossed it around.

Between us we've solved 80 of the 149 levels. It didn't come free: plenty I had to hand-hold or play through myself, and for the nasty ones I had Claude build a solver that watches YouTube speedruns and rebuilds the moves frame by frame (oddly satisfying to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wndAf4EXNc).

It also built a full level editor (https://claudes-challenge.vercel.app/?level=1#editor) and a replay viewer to watch the solved levels back (https://claudes-challenge.vercel.app/replay.html).

Code: https://github.com/blumk/claudes-challenge

Obligatory IP note: this is someone else's game. I'm assuming it's effectively abandonware but I honestly don't know, so the site might have to come down at some point. The repo is stripped of all the original art and assets, code only.

1 comments

Nice job - but it's definitely not abandonware having been re-released on Steam [1] (along with a sequel) back in 2015.

Regarding the verifier that plays against the live engine, I’ve approached the problem from a similar angle by having LLM agents effectively borrow a page from the speedrunning community in the form of tool-assisted speedruns, allowing the LLM access only to a virtualized game controller.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/346850/Chips_Challenge_1

Good catch on the Steam re-release. I'll add a note, or pull the site if it comes to that.

Curious about your agent setup though. Any public repo?

Even if you do pull the game itself I would still definitely leave all the post mortem stuff up. I think it's just as interesting and worth keeping around - especially the YT vids demonstrating the harness.

I don't have a GH repo up for the TAS system yet - it's a bespoke mess right now since it was built with the old game "Castle of the Winds" in mind but I'll definitely consider it in the future!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_the_Winds