Does the robots-in-a-corridor conclusion survive a more humanlike crowd?

What it found

The society-plaza corridor rerun with four crowds of simulated people: varied speeds and sideways-push weights, a 0.4 s reaction delay, 30% stubborn walkers, and all three (10 seeds per cell). Adaptive robots stay free and committed robots never flip the crowd (at most 58% prefer their side) in every crowd. The size of the slowdown (a loss of 0.17 to 0.49 of desired speed at 30% robots) and of personal-space intrusions (0.03 to 0.36 of agent time; reaction delay alone gives 0.087 with no robots) depends strongly on the crowd. Hand-chosen perturbations, not fitted to data; simulated walkers only.

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 many robots does it take to change a crowd's walking side when some people never adapt?How many robots does it take to change a crowd's walking side when some people never adapt? With 0, 20, 40 and 50% stubborn walkers the mean-field tipping share (memory 9) rises 0.217, 0.240, 0.283, 0.329, simulation agrees within 0.02, and committed-robot conflict costs barely change. Stylised.
• 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.
• Does a stubborn block that slowly converts let a smaller robot minority tip a crowd's walking side?Does a stubborn block that slowly converts let a smaller robot minority tip a crowd's walking side? With 40% stubborn walkers, 24% robots never tip (0 of 12) but tip all 12 at 0.1% conversion per round (median round 721).
• Can a simulation run be turned into a watchable, honest episode?Can a simulation run be turned into a watchable, honest episode? Five seeded, labelled-fiction episodes of a robot town built on society-trust, with turning points found by code and a narration read from the record: even-handed gossip recovers, 4× negativity locks the town out, explained failures recover, and 2× ends both ways by seed. Stylised.
• 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

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.