Should a robot yield only to people in a hurry, or to everyone?
research/society-urgentdoor
Should a robot yield only to people in a hurry, or to everyone? With 30% robots and 20% urgent people, a fleet that yields only to the urgent cuts their cost by 40% (1.130 to 0.676) at a 3% cost to everyone else, is individually stable, and costs the robots 29%.
What it found
The go-or-yield door game of society-doorway with a share of urgent people (waiting cost 3x) and robots that read a partner's urgency. With 30% robots, 20% urgent people, collision cost 3 and dithering cost 1, a fleet that yields only to urgent people and goes first against the rest cuts urgent people's cost per encounter from 1.130 to 0.676 (−40%) and raises normal people's from 1.051 to 1.087 (+3%); it is individually stable, but robots' own cost rises from 1.00 to 1.29 and the crowd overall is worse off (1.091 vs 1.047) unless urgent people are 40% or more. Mean field, checked by simulation within 0.02. Assumed, not sourced: round-figure costs (swept), perfect urgency reading, random pairing, no geometry.
Paper, code and results
More in Robot societies among people
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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.