Neural Arcade: Make papers playable

Turn dense ML/AI research papers into interactive, playable experiments. Built for the Cal Hacks AI Hackathon 2026 (track: Ddoski's Lab).

Upload a paper → get a concept map, a plain-English explanation, and a game where you first fail without the paper's idea, then win with it.

The 3-tier artifact

1. Understand — summary, plain-English steps, auto concept map. Works for any paper (always-on fallback).
2. Play — a challenge built from the paper's core idea, with a goal and a score.
3. Prove — "defeat it without the module": lose with the naive baseline, then unlock the paper's method as a power-up and win. Before/after metric ties back to the paper's claim.

Game template library

Template	Paper categories	Status
Maze Runner (A* vs naive BFS)	pathfinding / planning / search	✅ fully playable
Spotlight (uniform vs learned attention)	attention / transformer / NLP	✅ fully playable
Survivor (policy vs reward shaping)	reinforcement learning	▶ playable shell
Flatten It (intervention strategy)	epidemic / spread	▶ playable shell
Vision Detective (grounded VLM lab)	multimodal / vision-language / OCR / grounding	✅ fully playable

Adding a game? See CONTRIBUTING.md — the wiring guide, the two patterns (decoupled /dev/<engine> vs. fully-wired upload flow), and the additive-only rule for shared files that keeps merges conflict-free.

Architecture

• Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind
• Claude (Anthropic) powers the pipeline: extract → classify → explain (lib/pipeline.ts)
• Redis caches sessions/artifacts (lib/redis.ts); falls back to in-memory if REDIS_URL is unset
• Arize logs eval scores — faithfulness & hallucination risk (lib/arize.ts); no-ops without keys

API routes

Route	Purpose
POST /api/extract	PDF/text → structured artifact (runs the full pipeline)
POST /api/classify	category → game template (debug/sponsor demo)
POST /api/explain	summary → plain-English + concept map
POST /api/eval	text+summary → faithfulness / hallucination score

Run it

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # optional — app runs offline without keys
npm run dev                  # http://localhost:3000

Demo without any keys: the app ships with a themed offline artifact. Visit /result/demo or click "Skip to demo result" on the home page — the pathfinding game is fully playable. Add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to process real uploaded papers.

Env vars

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_MODEL (optional), REDIS_URL (optional), ARIZE_API_KEY, ARIZE_SPACE_ID (optional).

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Tagline: Make papers playable.