At what collision cost does a door stop tempting robots to go first?

What it found

A sweep of the go-or-yield door game of society-doorway over the collision cost k and dithering cost d (waiting cost w = 1). With 30% robots and d = 1, a fleet that always yields is individually stable only above k* = 2.80: below it a single robot gains by going, although yielding is still best for the crowd (a dilemma). The threshold rises with d (k* = 1.46 at d = 0.25, 7.64 at d = 4) and with robot share (3.82 at 50% robots, d = 1). When collisions are cheaper than waiting (k = 0.5) going is best for everyone. society-doorway's k = 3 sat just above the threshold. Mean field; simulation agrees on costs within 0.04. Stylised: random pairing, fixed costs, no geometry.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
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More in Robot societies among people

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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.