bt-tournament

name	bt-tournament
description	Rank competing hypotheses or proof skeletons from the complete comparison ledger using a joint batch MAP Bradley-Terry fit and approximate posterior intervals. Use whenever 3 or more candidates compete for the next experiment, or when the user asks which branch currently leads. Do not present the intervals as calibrated confidence bounds.

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.