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Robot societies among people

Does the rule that robot blocks must be narrower than the neighbourhood carry over from a ring to a 2D grid?

research/society-grid

On a 16x16 torus (memory 9), robot patches up to about 2k+1 sites wide tip every crowd at robot share 0.25 and wider ones tip few or none; one 8x8 patch of all the robots tips none at any neighbourhood radius up to 5.

9 tests

What it found

society-allies found on a ring that committed robots stop tipping a crowd's passing-side convention once a block is wider than the neighbourhood, and asked about a 2D grid. This simulates 256 people on a 16×16 torus (memory 9, error 0.02, partners within Chebyshev radius k, 20 seeds) with robots in square patches. Spread robots at k = 7 bracket the well-mixed mean-field threshold 0.2165 (0 of crowds tip at 0.18, all at 0.22). At robot share 0.25, patches up to about 2k + 1 sites wide tip every crowd; at k = 1 a 4×4 patch tips 10% and 6×6 none, and one 8×8 patch tips none at any k up to 5. At share 0.35 only the single 8×8 patch fails at small k. The sweep confounds patch size with patch count, so the 2k + 1 threshold is read off the cells, not derived. Stylised: binary choice, a square torus, ε and memory taken from society-robotnorms, not fitted; no real crowd data.

A figure from its own output

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

Paper, code and results

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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.