Letting Claude Play Text Adventures

Summary

The other day I went to an AI hackathon organized by my friends Lucia and Malin. The theme was mech interp, but I hardly know PyTorch so I planned to do something at the API layer rather than the model layer. Something I think about a lot is cognitive architectures (like Soar and ACT-R). This is like a continuation of GOFAI research, inspired by cognitive science. And like GOFAI it’s never yielded anything useful. But I often think: can we scaffold LLMs with cog arch-inspired harnesses to overcome their limitations? LLM agents like Claude Code are basically “accidental” cognitive architectures: they are designed and built my practitioners rather than theorists, but they have commonalities, they all need a way to manage memory, tool use, a task agenda etc. Maybe building an agent on a more “principled” foundation, one informed by cognitive science, yields a higher-performing architecture. So I sat around a while thinking how to adapt Soar’s architecture to an LLM agent. And I sketched something out, but then I thought: how can I prove this performs better than baseline? I need an eval, a task. Math problems? Too one-shottable. A chatbot? Too interactive, I want something hands-off and long-horizon. A coding agent? That’s too freeform and requires too much tool use. And then I thought: text adventures! You have a stylized, hierarchically-structured world accessible entirely tthrough text, long-term goals, puzzles, physical exploration and discovery of the environment. Even the data model of text adventures resembles frame-based knowledge representation systems. And there’s a vast collection of games available online. Anchorhead, which I played years ago, is a Lovecraft-inspired text adventure by Michael S. Gentry. It takes on the order of hundrds of turns to win across multiple in-game days. And the game world is huge and very open. In other words: a perfect long-horizon task. So I started hacking. The frotz interpreter runs on the command line and has a “dumb” interf...