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Robot societies among people

How big a block of committed robots can a ring crowd take before the passing-side convention stops tipping?

research/society-allies

On a ring where people meet partners within 2 sites (memory 9), evenly spread robots at 12% tip every crowd but blocks of 3 or more tip none; at 20% blocks up to 3 still tip, and the largest tipping block grows with the neighbourhood (2 at k = 1 or 2, 4 at k = 3 or 5, 8 at k = 10).

7 tests

What it found

society-robotnorms compared robots evenly spread with robots in one block on a ring crowd. Here the block size is swept between (200 people, memory 9, ε = 0.02, 20 seeds, 500 rounds). At a robot share of 0.12 and neighbourhood k = 2, singles tip every crowd (0.992 of people switch), pairs 25% of crowds, blocks of 3 or more none; at 0.20, blocks up to 3 tip 70% or more and blocks of 4 none. The largest block that still tips grows with k (2 at k = 1–2, 4 at 3–5, 8 at 10). Partial blocks cost the most conflicts (0.11–0.15 per human meeting at 0.20, against 0.046 for singles) for little conversion. Block 1 and one block reproduce the earlier project exactly. Limits: stylised binary game on a 1D ring, only the robot share, block size and k are swept (ε and memory are the earlier project’s chosen values), and the “block < neighbourhood” rule is read from a grid, not derived.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/society-allies: block_size
society-allies/experiments/block_size.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.