One question, three instruments
Darts cricket looks simple: close seven numbers, keep the score in your favor. But under a realistic accuracy model, every turn hides a genuine decision — score, close, or deny — and folk doctrine disagrees about all three. Over five months and 36 research sessions (February 5 to July 2, 2026) , this project attacked the question with three independent instruments: an automated discovery loop that invents, benchmarks, and prunes hand-coded strategies; a reinforcement-learning arc that trains a neural policy from imitation through league self-play; and an exact dynamic-programming solve that computes true win probabilities for the whole endgame.
The three methods check one another. The discovery loop's champions were re-run in a clean-room replication, rated against the neural policies on a single Elo ladder, and audited move-by-move against the exact solve. Where all three point the same way — ties go to the closer, take the minimum-miss single, shut the scoring faucet before mopping up — the advice is as solid as simulation can make it. Where they disagree, that disagreement is itself a finding, and the chapters say so. The synthesis is a single verdict: all three lineages, placed on one Bradley–Terry scale, form a near-total order — a 27-strategy field with a clear top, headed by The Closer (it3) at Elo 1222 . All results on this site are frozen as of July 2, 2026 .
The Story — seven chapters, in order
The story wing is a narrative in research order: each chapter states its question, its method, and its numbers, and each ends where the next begins. Read straight through, it is the account of a champion being crowned, doubted, replicated against, out-learned, and finally graded against ground truth.
- The Field — the arena: the classic cricket playbook of Frongello strategies and experimental variants, and the simulator that scores them.
- The False Summit — the first invented champion collapsed under two simulator bugs. The retraction became the replication gate every later result had to survive.
- The Shape Reader — an autonomous discovery loop ran 89 iterations in two days and produced X188: #1 at all 11 tested skill levels, within its 31-strategy field .
- The Rerun — the same loop, restarted with a clean context, found a decisive endgame law at iteration 3 that the original never found in 115 entries — and its champion, The Shutout (X181), outrates the original's .
- The Learner — imitation, PPO, then league self-play: from a 49.3% historical ceiling to the strongest artifact in the project — including one instructive failure by reward hacking .
- Ground Truth — the exact solve of 4.16 billion endgame states grades every champion's endgame. No one plays it perfectly; the neural policy comes closest, agreeing on 74.0% of 71,961 audited decisions .
- One Ladder — all three lineages rated on one Bradley–Terry scale, where the 27-strategy field turns out to be, to measurement precision, a total order .
Play Better — what to do with it at the oche
The advice wing distills the research into rules a human can hold in their head mid-game. No interactive advisors, no votes — each rule cites the measured number that earned it a place.
- The Rule Card — seven rules from the champions and the exact solve, led by the one that is arithmetic rather than advice: ties go to the closer, so on a level score, close .
- Underdog Play — what changes when you are the weaker thrower: The Grinder (X214_UD) denies at any deficit and shrinks the farming cap, worth 17.63% vs a 15.31% baseline underdog win rate — a 15% relative improvement .
Reference — look anything up, verify everything
The Reference page is the lookup wing: the full strategy catalog on one Elo scale, the benchmark and validation methodology, the raw data files (ladder.json, endgame_audit.json), and a register of every citable fact on this site by stable ID. Every load-bearing number in every chapter links there. If you read one wing with a skeptical eye, read that one.