How many robots does it take to change a crowd's walking side when some people never adapt?

What it found

The society-robotnorms committed-robot model with a share s of stubborn people who always walk right. The mean-field tipping share for memory 9 rises from 0.217 (s = 0) to 0.240, 0.283 and 0.329 at s = 0.2, 0.4 and 0.5, and memory 5 and 9 coincide from s = 0.4. Simulation (200 people, 12 seeds) agrees within 0.02 at every s when “tipped” means a majority of adaptive people on the robots' side. Conflict costs of committed and adaptive robots are unchanged by stubborn people. Stylised; simulated walkers only.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

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• White paper
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More in Robot societies among people

• How many robots does it take to change a crowd's walking side when some people always walk on the robots' side?How many robots does it take to change a crowd's walking side when some people always walk on the robots' side? Each 5% of always-robot-side people cuts the memory-9 mean-field tipping share (0.217) by about 0.04, 25% tip a crowd with no robots, opposing blocs raise the bar, and simulation agrees within 0.01. Stylised.
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• 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

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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.