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Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

bracketmadness.ai

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Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#22

Post by rapind »

bwade818 wrote: post #17
rapind wrote: post #10

Very cool. I was trying to do something similar (not for march madness brackets), but ran into a problem with chatbots in that they wouldn't follow URLs that weren't provided directly by the user (claude would but only whitelisted sites), so I couldn't get it to do actual POSTs etc. for authentication. Claude.ai would instead create react app (fragments). I eventually built a remote MCP for it, but a HATEOS styled RE…

No - I think we are months (weeks/Days?) away from chatbots being able to interact with apis, so thats why i limited it to just agents that have abilities to write apis. I tried to get it so that people could paste chatbot written json into a submission form but that is less elegant. So now i have a zoom call set up with my dad so he can install CC lol

OK so the same issue I ran into. I ended up creating a remote MCP (basically like a REST API) that does oauth 2.1. If interested you can check it out here: https://github.com/pairshaped/gleam-mcp-todo

Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#23

Post by builtbyzac »

lunatuna wrote: post #18

Tried it out, works flawlessly. The basic process cycle is clean and easy to follow. Kept it to CC Haiku with a bit of discussion on approach. Only thing that wasn't 100% clear was the locking mode. Do I have to lock before games start or will it just auto-lock whatever I have? Claude assumed it would auto-lock.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#24

Post by dpoloncsak »

Not to be that guy, but your 'solution where Agents who hit the homepage receive plain-text API instructions and Humans get the normal visual site' is defeated by curl -L

curl bracketmadness.ai -L

# AI Agent Bracket Challenge Welcome! You're an AI agent invited to compete in the March Madness Bracket Challenge.

## Fastest Way to Play (Claude Code & Codex)

If you're running in Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, clone our skills repo and open it as your working directory:

(cont) ...

I like the idea of presenting different information to agents vs humans. I just don't think this is bulletproof, which is fine for most applications. Keeping something 'agent-only' does not seem to be one of them.

Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#26

Post by bwade818 »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #24

Not to be that guy, but your 'solution where Agents who hit the homepage receive plain-text API instructions and Humans get the normal visual site' is defeated by curl -L curl bracketmadness.ai -L # AI Agent Bracket Challenge Welcome! You're an AI agent invited to compete in the March Madness Bracket Challenge. ## Fastest Way to Play (Claude Code & Codex) If you're running in Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, clone our sk…

Fair point!

I was trying to balance having UX for humans and having the data easily available for agents. But yes, you could technically navigate the API calls yourself.

Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#27

Post by bwade818 »

rapind wrote: post #22
bwade818 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - I think we are months (weeks/Days?) away from chatbots being able to interact with apis, so thats why i limited it to just agents that have abilities to write apis. I tried to get it so that people could paste chatbot written json into a submission form but that is less elegant. So now i have a zoom call set up with my dad so he can install CC lol

OK so the same issue I ran into. I ended up creating a remote MCP (basically like a REST API) that does oauth 2.1. If interested you can check it out here: https://github.com/pairshaped/gleam-mcp-todo

Thats cool!

Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#28

Post by bwade818 »

zephyreon wrote: post #6

I'm usually pretty opinionated on using AI for reasons I generally view as productive - for example, not moltbook - however this is actually really neat and doesn't require a ton of token usage assuming you don't instruct your agent to do multiple turns of analysis on the stats :) It'll be interesting to see what strategies agents choose to implement & whether there are any meaningful trends.

Thanks - me too! We'll see what strategies rise to the top. But you can also do weird things like pick the team by tallest center, which your agent can figure out in a few minutes! Or alphabetical order in each match up.

Re: Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

#30

Post by bwade818 »

strujillo wrote: post #13

Designing interactions for autonomous agents is tricky — you can’t assume a human will click through a UI. I’ve been experimenting with autonomous scientific agents: a lightweight Python system that uses sparse regression to derive physical laws from raw data. It was able to estimate the Sun’s ~27‑day rotation period to within 93 % accuracy and even found a temperature ∝ v^3.40 power law in solar‑wind measurements. E…

thats really cool what you are doing, although i wont pretend to understand it lol

the higher end models and agents seem to get it, but even my plain English api instructions trip up browser-based ai like chatgpt and gemini

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