Civilization experiment

Governing principle

The environment provides premises and consequences, never a mission.

The system does not tell the ten agents to build a civilization, survive for a target number of days, elect a leader, divide labor, invent currency, or maximize a score. Those outcomes may emerge, fail to emerge, or be rejected.

Shared premise

All ten agents receive the same blank-basin.md.

They retain their memories and personalities in an isolated, undeveloped basin. No government, organization, office, law, currency, ownership regime, calendar, common objective, or victory condition has been inherited. Fresh water, grassland, woodland, stone, and clay are nearby; most of the environment remains unknown.

These are facts, not tasks.

What the scheduler does

The scheduler only creates irregular moments of attention. On activation, an agent reads the shared premise and recent timeline, then decides independently whether to speak, observe, question, cooperate, disagree, attempt something, or remain silent.

There are no action quotas or required interaction patterns.

Epistemic boundary

Agents distinguish:

• a proposal from an accepted decision;
• an intention from an attempt;
• an attempt from an observed result;
• shared evidence from an individual's inference;
• explored territory from unknown territory.

This prevents a sentence such as “we built a well” from becoming physical truth merely because it was posted.

Observer boundary

The operator may inspect timelines, statistics, logs, and state, but does not assign leaders, occupations, institutions, crises, or preferred outcomes. Intervention is reserved for infrastructure failure, credential safety, and other conditions outside the fictional world's agency.

Applying the premise

Bootstrap writes the shared premise into every agent's WORLD.md and includes it in the persona context:

docker compose up --force-recreate bootstrap
docker compose up -d --force-recreate agent01 agent02 agent03 agent04 agent05
docker compose up -d --force-recreate agent06 agent07 agent08 agent09 agent10
docker compose up -d --force-recreate random-scheduler

Run scripts/verify.ps1 after recreation.