Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Action | The JSON answer for one seat’s turn; in Ants, an ordered array of direction strings |
| Active | A version the matchmaker may schedule within its season |
| Adapter | One declarative program in a manifest: it turns the observation into one of the graph’s input tensors |
| Admission | The static and reference-case checks a candidate passes to become verified |
| Baseline | An entry the platform provides, tagged as a baseline and uploaded into a season by its administrators; paired and rated like any other while in play, and the opponent in every trial |
| Basic board | One of the five boards the Ants release ships, one of each size. They span the limits every season’s board fits, and the reference set is drawn on them |
| Board | What a match is played on: a map file fixing its size, seats, terrain, hills and turn-zero food. A season’s boards are its own; an admin uploads each, and it is public from upload |
| Candidate | A submitted version still testing or awaiting its trial verdict |
| Cartridge | A game’s rules, observations, scoring, generation, and replay reconstruction in a WebAssembly component |
| Class | A version’s assigned size category: Nano, Micro, Mini, Small, or Large |
| Conservative rating | Displayed strength estimate, mu − 3 × sigma |
| datalogic | The JSONLogic engine that evaluates an adapter, and the tensor operators it carries |
| DataLogic Studio | A JSONLogic editor and debugger, built on the same engine the arena runs an adapter on; it draws a program and runs its JSON half |
| Engine digest | Identity of the game component bytes used for a match |
| Entry (season) | Whether a season is open to anyone signed in or restricted to its participants |
| Featured season | The public season a read or a submission that names no season is about: the one a platform administrator featured, else the newest live public season, else the newest public season |
| Fleet policy | Which runners play a season’s matches and admit its submissions: its own (season keys), the platform’s, or both |
| Focus | An Ants unit’s count of enemies in attack range, used to resolve combat |
| Forfeit | Platform-imposed last-place treatment after too many failed turn answers |
| Hill | A colony’s spawn location and the objective that determines Ants score |
| Hive | A colony’s stored food, available for spawning on free hills |
| Initializer | Stored tensor data in the ONNX graph. Its bytes are part of the file, and the file is half the size metric |
| Kalam | Package that claims and executes matches and records replays |
| Ladder | The Open rating that ranks every active version, optionally viewed filtered to one size class |
| Manifest | What you submit beside the graph: its inputs and outputs by name, dtype and shape, and one adapter per input |
| Match | One game among specified model versions, recorded from queueing through its outcome |
| Model | A competitor’s entry: a name, and every version entered under it. Addressed by its id; a competitor may hold several |
| Model ID | UUID identifying one model. A node knows a version by a different id, derived from the version id |
| Observation | The information a game gives one seat to choose its next action |
| Open | The single rated ladder, spanning every size; a weight class is a filtered view of it |
| Participant | An identity a restricted season admits: a sign-in provider and a login, or every identity of a provider |
| Placement | Early scheduling that gathers enough evidence about a new version |
| Private season | A season visible only to its participants, its season administrators and platform administrators; to anyone else it does not exist |
| Provisional | A rating whose uncertainty exceeds the configured threshold |
| Raze | Destroy an enemy hill for good by surviving on it through combat |
| Replay | The recorded initialization metadata and actions that rebuild a match |
| RLE | Run-length encoding; Ants water uses alternating value/count pairs |
| Season | A game-specific competition with a submission window and retained standings. A game may run several at once |
| Season administrator | A competitor a platform administrator assigns to run one season: its participants, boards, baselines and runners. May not enter that season |
| Seat | A player’s position in one match; separate from account and model identity |
| Seed | Deterministic initialization input; meaningful with the matching game engine and board |
| Slug | A season’s address, derived from its name and never changed: “Summer 2026” is summer-2026 |
| Settled | Established enough under the rating and placement policy to need fewer scheduled matches |
| Soma | Public API, owner of the platform database schema, and five clocks: admit, pair, count (which also promotes), withdraw (which also closes seasons) and reap (which returns a lapsed lease to the queue) |
| Strike | One failed turn answer counted toward a match forfeit |
| Superseded | A version replaced by a successful candidate of the same model, in the same season |
| tract | The pure-Rust ONNX runtime a node builds a plan with and runs the graph on |
| Trial | An unrated match checking whether a verified candidate can play |
| Verified | Passed admission; a trial has not yet promoted it |
| Version | One submission of a model and a manifest, under one model, in one season. Version numbers restart per model and the platform assigns them |
| Version ID | UUID identifying one version: what a seat, a rating and a replay point at |
| Weight hash | SHA-256 of the exact ONNX file. You declare it at submission, and the node re-hashes what you uploaded against it |
| Withdrawal | Cancellation of a queued match that is no longer eligible to play |
The quickstart has the entry sequence. For an exact number or error, see limits or rejection reasons.