Adversarial Labyrinth

Crankshaft News · 2026 · Industrial track

Playing the Book

One opening sentence. Two clocks. A disk. A typeset novel. The docs folder is not an afterthought — it is the argument: paper, fifteen slides, and the operator contract.

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The industrial problem

Newsrooms asked a language model for 500 pages and learned that a context window is not a campaign. Plots collapsed. Twists arrived unearned. Overnight jobs died on a single HTTP timeout.

Crankshaft News needed a batch product: type one line, leave the machine, return to a book-class PDF — or resume from SQLite after a crash. Local ollama serve or Ollama Cloud. CLI, not a web app. pdflatex, not a chat transcript.

The form

We call it an adversarial labyrinth: long fiction that outplays the implied reader while staying causally fair. The manuscript is the after-action report of a narrative wargame. Genre and cast are inferred from the opening line. There is no questionnaire.

“A 500-page labyrinth is a game with two clocks and a disk.”
Figure 1. The campaign is the book

A 500-page manuscript is not one generation. It is the export of a played narrative wargame. Models propose JSON moves. Rust and disk own the truth.

01
Opening line
committed prose
02
Strategist
factions · ledger
03
Tactician
scene beat
04
Adversary
optional reversal
05
Writer × N
parallel drafts
06
Critic + Rust
leaks are hard gate
07
SQLite
checkpoint
08
book.tex → PDF
pdflatex × 2
Figure 2. Newsroom failure modes

Relative severity from pilots that asked a single prompt to remember a novel. Scores are qualitative, not a public benchmark.

  • Context collapse92

    mid-book forgets the plant

  • Unfair surprise74

    reversal with no earlier clue

  • Job fragility81

    one timeout kills the night

Figure 3. Campaign shape vs page target

Chapters = ⌈P / 10⌉. Scenes per chapter step from 2 to 5. A 500-page job is a 50 × 5 grid, plus the opening as scene 0.

1–2 pp
3–19 pp
20–99 pp
500 pp
chapters scenes / chapter
Figure 4. What each model call actually sees

The transcript is not the memory. A slice plus JSON schema is.

  • Unlocked facts
  • Last 1–2 scenes
  • Chapter rollup (~400 tok)
  • Beat sheet
  • Not sent: full novel

Public archive

Read the docs on stage

Paper, 15-slide Beamer deck, and reference manual. Preview in the browser or download the PDF. These files live in the site's public folder even though the source repository stays private.

Industrial-track paper

Playing the Book · 4 pages · The newsroom problem, the campaign architecture, and operational lessons from a 500-page batch.

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