Bt Tournament

BT Tournament

This skill records pairwise judgments and refits the complete comparison ledger. The lcb and ucb names are retained for compatibility, but they are 95% approximate posterior intervals from a centered Laplace approximation. They are not calibrated frequentist confidence intervals or strict LUCB bounds.

When to invoke

• Researcher subagent has just emitted >= 3 hypothesis nodes in one turn.
• The user explicitly typed /bt-tournament.
• The cockpit shows candidates with unresolved approximate intervals and the user asks which to push first.

Workflow

1. Gather the candidate hypothesis node ids and texts from mcp__memory__get_active_frontier.
2. For each pair you intend to compare, call mcp__memory__judge_hypotheses to fetch the canonical comparison prompt. Evaluate inline (do not spawn a sub-agent just to judge).
3. Decide a winner. Call mcp__memory__record_judgement(a, b, winner, reason). Internally this records the comparison and updates the BT leaderboard; you do not need to call update_bt_rating separately.
4. Pull the leaderboard via mcp__memory__get_bt_leaderboard(top_k=10). Look at strength, probability_best, n_comparisons, fit_converged, and insufficient_samples.
5. Compare the top two with mcp__memory__compare_bt_candidates(top_id, runner_up_id). Stop when every serious candidate has at least 3 relevant comparisons and probability_a_beats_b >= 0.95. Also stop if the budget is exhausted or the user chooses. If fit_converged is false, do not use the posterior probability as a stopping rule; report the fit risk instead.
6. Hand off the top-2. Quote strength, approximate interval, comparison count, probability_best, the top-vs-runner-up probability, and the explicit posterior_calibrated=False caveat. If insufficient_samples is true, say so.

Default judging criteria

• novelty
• feasibility
• falsifiability

Guardrails

• Only compare hypothesis nodes against hypothesis nodes (the MCP enforces this and will raise).
• Keep reasons short and concrete; they are stored with the comparison and re-surfaced in the cockpit.
• Do not call either pause-suggestion tool from inside this skill. Pausing is a separate user or lifecycle-policy decision.
• If the cockpit is running, the BT update emits a bt_rating_updated event so the TUI's leaderboard updates without a manual refresh.