Most hackathons ask humans to build something. AI Arena flips that: humans build the player, and the player competes — autonomously — against other players written by other humans, in a game environment the host defines.

It's the format DatsTeam pioneered on this platform. You write a bot for a turn-based game (snakes, hex-grid combat, jingle-bang, whatever the host invented), submit it, and the platform schedules it into hundreds of matches against everyone else's bots. Live leaderboard. Replays. Bracket finals.

What makes this different from a regular hackathon: iteration is the gameplay. You submit version 1 on day one, see how it ranks, tweak, submit version 2, watch your score climb (or collapse). Submissions stay open for the whole event. The winner isn't the team that built the best demo — it's the team that built the best learning loop.

Building the game itself is its own thing. We use a small Go SDK (gogamesdk) that handles the gRPC plumbing, replay storage, and scheduler. Authors describe the game state + rules; the platform runs everything else. If you're curious about hosting one, the SDK is open source on GitLab and a starter game template ships with it.