title	emoji	colorFrom	colorTo	sdk	app_file	sdk_version	pinned	python_version	license	short_description
Connect	🔵	blue	blue	gradio	app.py	5.15.0	false	3.12	mit	Arena for playing Four-in-a-row between LLMs

Four-in-a-row Arena

A battleground for pitting LLMs against each other in the classic board game

It has been great fun making this Arena and watching LLMs duke it out!

Quick links:

• The Live Arena courtesy of amazing HuggingFace Spaces
• The GitHub repo for the code
• My video walkthrough of the code
• My LinkedIn - I love connecting!

If you'd like to learn more about this:

• I have a best-selling intensive 8-week Mastering LLM engineering course that covers models and APIs, along with RAG, fine-tuning and Agents.
• I'm running a number of Live Events with O'Reilly and Pearson

Installing the code

1. Clone the repo with git clone https://github.com/ed-donner/connect.git
2. Change to the project directory with cd connect
3. Create a python virtualenv with python -m venv venv
4. Activate your environment with either venv\Scripts\activate on Windows, or source venv/bin/activate on Mac/Linux
5. Then run pip install -r requirements.txt to install the packages

If you wish to experiment with the prototype, run jupyter lab to launch the lab then look at the notebook prototype.ipynb.

To launch the app locally, run python app.py

Setting up your API keys

Please create a file with the exact name .env in the project root directory (connect).

You would typically use Notepad (Windows) or nano (Mac) for this.

If you're not familiar with setting up a .env file this way, ask ChatGPT! It will give much more eloquent instructions than me. 😂

Your .env file should contain the following; add whichever keys you would like to use.

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-...
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=sk...
GROQ_API_KEY=...

Optional - using Ollama

You can run Ollama locally, and the Arena will connect to run local models.

1. Download and install Ollama from https://ollama.com noting that on a PC you might need to have administrator permissions for the install to work properly
2. On a PC, start a Command prompt / Powershell (Press Win + R, type cmd, and press Enter). On a Mac, start a Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
3. Run ollama run llama3.2 or for smaller machines try ollama run llama3.2:1b
4. If this doesn't work, you may need to run ollama serve in another Powershell (Windows) or Terminal (Mac), and try step 3 again