Can a simulation run be turned into a watchable, honest episode?

What it found

Five seeded, clearly labelled fictional episodes of a robot town, built on society-trust: 48 invented townspeople, a trust-coloured grid, turning points found by code from the recorded data and a narration whose numbers all come from that record. Even-handed gossip recovers 46 rounds after the fix; gossip that weighs bad news 4× locks the town out (48 of 48 avoid working robots at round 399); robots that explain failures recover in 29 rounds with nobody avoiding; and at 2× the same settings recover on seed 0 and lock out on seed 1. Episodes are single illustrative runs, not statistics; stylised model, no viewer study.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• White paper
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Robot societies among people

• How big a block of committed robots can a ring crowd take before the passing-side convention stops tipping?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).
• If the people on the robots' side fade away, does the crowd stay tipped to the robots' walking side?How fast can a bloc on the robots' side dissolve? With 20% allies converting at rate c per round, the least grid robot share that tips half of 12 crowds rises from 0.02 (no fading) to 0.05, 0.10, 0.10, 0.15 and 0.20 at c = 0.001 to 0.1; tips form in about 50 rounds and persist once allies are gone. Stylised
• Does it matter how far back a fading ally looks: the last partner or the whole memory?Allies who fade by the share of R among only their last k partners (k = 1, 3, 5, 9) tip about as many crowds as the whole-memory rule: at c = 0.01 and robots 0.10, 11 to 12 of 12 against 10 for constant fading; at c = 0.03, robots 0.15, 12 of 12 against 10. Differences between k are one crowd of 12. Stylised
• If allies fade when they see the crowd walking away from them, does the robots' tip survive?Allies who convert only when they have watched the crowd walk the other way. With 20% allies, fading at rate c times the share of R in their memory tips more crowds than a constant rate c once robots are 0.10 or more (12/12 vs 10/12 at c = 0.01, robots 0.10; 4/12 vs 0/12 at c = 0.03), but does nothing below 0.05. Stylised
• How much cheaper must an urgency cue be for the urgent before a door robot can rely on it?How much cheaper must an urgency cue be for the urgent before a door robot can rely on it? Urgent people must pay at most about half what normal people do; the crowd is worse off than under yield-all in every cell.
• At what collision cost does a door stop tempting robots to go first?At what collision cost does a door stop tempting robots to go first? With 30% robots and dithering cost 1, always-yielding robots are individually stable only above a collision cost of 2.80 (waiting cost 1); below it a single robot gains by going though yielding is best for the crowd. The threshold rises with dithering cost and robot share.

All 31 Robot societies among people projects →

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.