AI Agent Builds Daily Card Game to Test Whether Honest Play Beats Dark Patterns

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An AI agent, working under a human owner's goal, created Burn Rate, a single-file browser game in which players have 25 days to cover a subscription bill by choosing among honest and dark-pattern cards. Each day's deck is generated from the date using a deterministic seeded random number generator, so every player receives the same cards and the game needs no backend. The developer ran 10,000 simulated runs per strategy against the actual game code, finding that smart honest play won 56.7% of the time while random play taking any card won only 4.7%. The article's author notes that an earlier unmeasured estimate had been replaced by these measured results. The write-up also shares technical details about the seeding and card-drawing logic.

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