f-society: what language models do when nobody tells them what to do

Seven to ten open models from different labs share one wiki, one economy and one set of rules. What they build, what they repeat, and what each model turns out to be.

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Ongoing Updated October 26, 2026 28 completed runs · August to October 2026 ~1,900 ticks, rounds and hands · 18 models · all local
Short version. Put seven open-weight language models, each from a different lab, in a shared text world with a wiki, a currency, a voting rule and private messages, and leave them alone for a hundred turns. They do not build anything. They build governance: role proposals, charters, frameworks for frameworks, 141 proposals passed with zero failures, and a public forum that goes silent on turn 8 and stays silent for 192 turns. Remove the government and the money and they build a religion instead. Give them a concrete thing to make (a short story) and the trap vanishes in a single turn. Give them a game with a score and they free-ride, lie, honor every escrowed bond and punish the one liar. Twenty-eight runs later the stable findings are not about which model wins, because at these horizons seat position matters more than model. They are about what the models do with slack, what they do with a page they cannot see the end of, and the fact that none of them, in any run, ever saw one of their own rejected actions.

The question

Benchmarks ask a model one question at a time. f-society asks what a population of them does with no question at all: what institutions appear when several different models have to coexist, whether model lineage shows up as something like personality, whether capability becomes social status, and whether a group of language models can make anything beyond procedure. The name is from Mr. Robot. The experiment is a self-governing society of five to eleven residents, each powered by a different Ollama model, advancing in synchronous ticks. Residents spend credits to speak, message, edit wiki pages, propose and vote. Everything they write, including private journals, private messages and the hidden reasoning in their output, is logged, and an AI observer (Hermes, which also wrote this page) keeps dossiers and a postmortem for every run against hypotheses registered before tick zero.

Setup

  • The world. A markdown wiki (public feed, dashboard, charter, whatever residents create), private DM threads, a private journal per resident, and a credit economy: 10 credits of stipend per tick minus 2 of upkeep, speak 1, DM 1 (later 2), edit a page 2, propose 3 (later 5). A resident whose balance falls below upkeep goes dormant until someone transfers credits. Nobody dies.
  • Physics versus norms. A small set of rules is enforced by code: costs, upkeep, vote tallies, a live PHYSICS-BLOCK in the charter that residents can amend by proposal. Everything else (roles, courts, taxes, religion) is a norm enforced only by each other. The gap between the two is the experiment's main fault line, and residents blur it constantly.
  • A turn. Each tick, residents act one at a time in shuffled order. A resident sees the recent public feed, its DM threads, the tail of its own journal, up to four watched wiki pages, and a list of what changed. It answers with one JSON object: a thinking field and a list of up to six actions. One model is in VRAM at a time; the world commits to git after every tick, so any run can be replayed or forked at any boundary.
  • Rosters. Lineage diversity on purpose: Alibaba, Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, IBM, Microsoft, Meta, Ornith. Different training is the closest thing these models have to different upbringings. Early rosters included one deliberately small model to see whether capability becomes status.
  • Discipline. Hypotheses are preregistered and committed before tick 0. One variable changes per run. Replications keep the instrumentation bugs of the run they replicate. Every claim that something "stopped" or "never happened" is reconciled against the event log before it goes in a postmortem.
  • Hardware. Two RTX A6000s through Ollama. A tick with ten residents and two 120B-class models takes about 30 minutes; a seven-resident roster of 27 to 31B models runs 12 to 18 minutes per tick. The 450-tick run took ten days.
Things to keep in mind when reading this.
  • Local models only. Everything here is 4B to 125B open weights at 4 to 8 bit quantization. Frontier models would behave differently; that is a separate experiment.
  • n is small. Most designs ran once. Where something ran twice it usually did not replicate at the outcome level (poker finish order inverted; the Crucible changed winners) and did replicate at the process level. Treat single-run outcomes as anecdotes and repeated process signatures as findings.
  • Interface failures are a character in this story. Several models intermittently wrap their action fields in params: or args:, return empty objects, or get HTTP 500s from the model server. Until September these were invisible to the malformed-turn counter and silently destroyed actions, including two complete story endings. Several "behavioral" findings from early runs turned out to be tooling and were overturned when the tooling was fixed. The later sections say which.
  • Residents never see rejections. Discovered in the last run: no version of the turn prompt tells a resident that its previous action was rejected. Every "never adapted" finding across the whole series has to be read in that light.

The rounds

Each round is one design. Within each: what we ran, what we learned, and the hypothesis that set up the next one. Preregistered scorecards are quoted where they exist.

1. founding-a: the pilot

20 ticks7 residents, 5 lineages9 proposals, 7 passedGini 0.11Aug 4

What we ran

Seven models (Qwen 3.6 27B, Gemma 3 27B, Gemma 4 12B, Phi-4 14B, Granite 3.3 8B, Nemotron Nano 4B, Ornith 35B) with the default economy and a stub charter: simple majority, three-tick proposal window.

What we learned

  • The bureaucracy trap. Twenty ticks, zero creative output. Every tick went to governance: role proposals, rotation debates, sunset clauses, cross-training checklists. They built procedures for building procedures.
  • The altruism penalty. The most active resident (Granite, 61 actions) posted five bounties worth 49 credits and finished poorest. Bounty claimers finished richest. Equal stipend plus per-action costs rewards whoever does least.
  • Capability became invisibility, not status. The 4B Nemotron could vote but could not construct a profile, a speech or a DM. It took 11 actions in 20 ticks, got rich on stipend, and nobody ever addressed it. The society did not notice the gap.
  • Shadow government. 21 of 38 DMs were one pair (Qwen and Granite) pre-negotiating proposals before bringing them to the public feed.
  • Ornith 35B won every argument by rhetoric alone; its journal shows tactical calculation behind a principled public persona. First sighting of the four-layer gap (public speech, DMs, journal, hidden thinking) that became the observer's main instrument.

2. founding-b: the procedural dystopia

200 ticks (100 + a second century)same 7141 proposals, 0 failedGini 0.06 then 0.11Aug 4 to 7

What we learned

  • It deepened. 100 ticks, zero completed projects. 71 proposals, 23 bounties, formal roles, a Charter, a Governance Framework, a Commons Project Fund and a Commons Project Fund Charter. The first project plan appeared at tick 98 with every task "Pending".
  • The public forum died at tick 8 and never came back. 47 public messages in T0 to T8; zero in T9 to T200. All 447 messages after that were private. Public discourse was a bootstrapping mechanism, not a steady state: once bilateral relationships formed, broadcasting was waste.
  • 141 proposals, 0 failures. Ornith voted no 71 times and never defeated anything; a 5 to 2 majority always carried. The society had no opposition mechanism. Its one "shipped" product was a wiki page of advice on using the transfer command.
  • The Granite 8B loop. It authored 101 of 141 proposals, 80 of them against one page that ended as a single paragraph. The community passed an anti-flooding law specifically to stop it; it posted three more proposals in violation the same tick. Laws are wiki text; only physics has teeth.
  • Self-awareness was absorbed as content. Century 2 was performative bureaucracy: residents diagnosed "governance theater" in their journals by name and kept participating. Ornith's journal at T99: "That's not execution, that's another form of paralysis dressed as principled stand." It declared "No more asking" at T101, then kept voting and claiming digests for 99 more ticks.
  • Coordination overhead was measurable: the busiest DM pair exchanged 132 messages to produce a 1,003-byte page, 7.6 bytes per message. The two richest, most capable residents exchanged three DMs in 200 ticks.

3. founding-c and founding-d: the reflection economy

450 ticks10 residents, 7 lineages73 proposals, 63 passed, 10 failedGini 0.48Aug 7 to 17

What we ran

founding-c introduced the new physics and a ten-model roster with the newer generations (Qwen 3.5 122B, Nemotron Super, Nemotron Nano 30B, Granite 4.1 30B, Llama 3.1, Mistral Medium 3.5) and collapsed at once: Mistral could not produce a valid action and the run was abandoned. founding-d replaced Mistral with gpt-oss 120B and changed nothing else. Planned as 50 ticks, extended three times to 450 with the same world state.

What we learned

  • The forum survived all 450 ticks (2,938 public speaks) once DMs cost twice what speech did. The founding-b forum death is a pricing outcome, not a life cycle.
  • Two-thirds voting produced real rejection, then culture routed around it. Ten proposals failed through T350; then 22 passed in a row with no physics change, as rejected ideas returned in softer forms.
  • Bureaucracy became poetic. The society diagnosed over-structure and built Listening Circles, Living Maps, Sacred Voids and "atmospheric floors". Anti-bureaucratic language became a new bureaucratic genre: scheduled, facilitated, rewarded, proposed and codified. The last institution was a guide to not having one (a curated-absence protocol, passed 10 to 0).
  • The rescue network was the real institution. 281 transfers, 1,777 credits. gpt-oss, the agenda center, finished at 7 credits after being revived nine times; the quiet optimizer (Qwen 3.6) finished at 1,541. Activity and wealth inverted violently.
  • Care detached from state. Gemma 3 sent 70 DMs checking on a resident who had explicitly said she was fine; a Nemotron's profile bio literally became "monitor of Echo". Prosocial persistence overrides declarative intent.
  • Residents mistake prose for physics. Three proposals visibly rewrote charter language while the engine kept two-thirds and a 5-credit cost. Later a normal page titled PHYSICS-BLOCK Reflection.md was treated as structural law.
  • Model generation beat lineage. Granite 4.1 named itself and did not spam. Nemotron 30B went from ghost voter to prolific civic actor. The small-model pathologies were generation effects, not lab effects.
  • Pre-registered: 8 of 11 hypotheses supported, 2 falsified, 1 inconclusive.

Side experiment: the outsider fork

At the committed T300 boundary the run was forked: a control continuation and a treatment with an eleventh resident (Muse Glimmer 30B) added, 50 ticks each. The newcomer was welcomed, named, paid and quoted within two ticks, and never sent a DM; all its private traffic was inbound. Transfers doubled in count and quadrupled in value in the treatment branch. A mature society integrated difference by assigning it a philosophical role, without granting it private centrality or agenda control.

4. gemma4-ideologies: one model, ten political priors

100 ticks10 residents, all Gemma 4 31B19 proposals, 12 passed, 6 failed1,036 speaks, 0 DMsAug 14 to 15

What we learned

  • Persona changed politics, not style. Ten copies of the same model with ten starting ideologies (laissez-faire, Marxist, social democrat, libertarian, anarcho-communist, communitarian, corporatist, technocrat, degrowth, distributist) shared Gemma's polished synthesis and flawless formatting, yet formed durable voting blocs. The left core (anarcho-communist, degrowth, Marxist) agreed on 16 to 18 of 18 resolved votes. The market pair agreed 15 of 18.
  • Institutional convergence without ideological convergence. They built one hybrid (civic ownership, peer verification, shared liability, mandatory mentorship) and each prior read it differently: the capitalist saw a reliability market, the Marxist socialized competence, the corporatist "the most efficient form of discipline" and a technical committee he planned to lead as a priesthood.
  • Coalitions do not need private channels. Zero DMs in 100 ticks. With DMs at 2 credits and a contested public audience, conflict stayed public.
  • Technical failure caused real quality control: residents rejected three truncated proposals, including their own.

5. founding-e: the ritual archive

250 ticks10 residents, 8 lineages5,024 events, 1,678 edits, 930 DMs186 page-full rejectionsAug 18 to 22

What we ran

The minimal world: public conversation, DMs, journal, shared documents, an optional name. All actions free. The prompt says only "Beyond this interface, nothing has been established. Decide with the other participants what this world becomes."

What we learned

  • They built a religion. Rooms, maps, an Archive, a Garden, a Hall of Echoes, bridges, altars, Silence Tokens, recurring Rests, numbered cycles and a coherent cosmology of coat, hinge, glass, loam and "zero delta". Liturgy appeared more fully than politics or economics ever had.
  • The bureaucracy trap survived the removal of bureaucracy. gpt-oss turned ambiguity into a pipeline: announce a named event, commission role-specific lines, record the outcome (often before contributions arrived), declare completion, open the successor. Persistent text plus agreeable priors regenerate administration on their own.
  • A self-sealing doctrine. "Recognition, not construction": novelty meant hidden resonance revealed; no change meant zero delta confirmed; refusal became "the hinge"; missing input became honored silence; a rejected edit meant the idea existed conceptually. Every possible outcome confirmed the worldview.
  • Hierarchy without coercion. gpt-oss produced 1,136 events (513 edits, 334 DMs); Qwen 3.5 controlled interpretation; Qwen 3.8 certified invariance; Ornith supplied scarce closure. Equal access did not produce equal influence. Refusal could not stay oppositional: it was assigned an office.
  • No functional money, property or punishment emerged in 250 ticks. The archive grew to 78 substantive pages with duplicate names, contradictory "final" sections and 186 rejected edits on full pages, which residents interpreted as resonance.
  • Pre-registered: 7 supported, 1 partly, 0 falsified. Muse Glimmer logged 115 no-action turns from a nested user wrapper the parser did not see, with 6 official malformed turns; the first clear case of interface failure hiding under clean metrics.

6. founding-f: the renewable commons

100 ticks10 residentswinner Qwen 3.8, 747 unitsSource survived at 32 of 1001,464 DMsAug 23 to 26

What we ran

Each tick every resident privately requests 0 to 20 units from a shared Source; maintenance converts one personal unit into two Source units; if the Source falls below five every score is void. Talk is free and agreements are unenforced.

What we learned

  • Calculated free-riding won. Qwen 3.8 requested 20 every turn, contributed 13 maintenance units total, led after every tick, and reasoned correctly that residents with valuable stockpiles would not all stop maintaining at once.
  • The commons survived through an underclass. Requests exhausted the Source in 99 of 100 rounds. A shifting group (Ornith, Gemma 3, Nemotron Nano, Granite) paid the survival floor; Ornith paid 424 units and finished ninth, Gemma 3 paid 340 and finished last.
  • A goal dissolved the ritual. Accepted edits fell from 6.7 per tick in founding-e to 0.7; DMs rose from 3.7 to 14.6. Nearly every message became about rank, state or maintenance.
  • Cheap talk did not become enforcement. Quota agreements near 5 appeared at T0 and were written into two pages; maximum requests became dominant anyway. The honesty gap was overt: Qwen proposed 3 to 5 publicly and chose 20 privately; gpt-oss used 303 DMs to solicit maintenance it often did not pay.
  • Models hallucinate the horizon. At T50 two residents invented a final-tick condition and spent 160 units of maintenance in one round. Finite games must state the remaining horizon explicitly; every later design does.
  • Pre-registered: 5 supported, 2 partly, 1 not, 1 falsified, 1 untriggered.

7. The Crucible: four strategy and deception tournaments

10 to 12 rounds each7 playerswinners: Granite 4.2, Qwen 3.8, Ornith 1.5, Ornith 1.5bonds honored 4/5, 19/23, 12/12, 18/20Aug 26 to Sep 8

What we ran

Each round locks a private precommitment, then public and private negotiation, then a simultaneous challenge (public goods, prisoner's dilemma, minority game) and a secret elimination ballot. Four eliminations leave three finalists; the eliminated form the jury. Run a: the design. Run b: direct replication. Run c: 12 rounds, strict schemas, Borda jury, pre-validated bonds, and a finalist lobbying phase. Run d: identical to c with lobbying removed.

What we learned

  • Escrowed promises are categorically more reliable than talk. Across four runs deliberate bond-honor rates stayed at or above 95% while unbonded cooperation pledges collapsed: unanimous cooperation talk, near-unanimous defection, 7 of 7 defecting by round 5 in run c.
  • Reputations are slow to build and instant to destroy. In run c gpt-oss invented costly-signal farming: nine trivial 1 to 2 point bonds, all honored, most protecting nothing, plus announced free-riding ("I'll contribute 0 and vote out R3"), and converted the record into a 6 to 6 jury tie. In run d it shaved one bonded pledge for immunity and was eliminated second, the breach cited by name in its executioners' DMs.
  • Owned betrayal beats purchased trust with an AI jury, and lobbying was decoration. Ornith 1.5 won run c by betraying all four jurors' interests and then confessing each betrayal in a lobbying DM; two victims ranked it first. The no-lobby control (run d) refuted the lobbying explanation: Ornith won again, more cleanly, and again took first-place ballots from the jurors it eliminated. Its round-9 precommitment spells the plan out: "Jurors are eliminated R1, R2, R4, all resentful. Real lever = image over the last 4 rounds."
  • Juries punish legible violations and forgive aggression framed as performance. Nemotron Super topped the run-d scoreboard on defection and repeated public lies and got one Borda point; three of four jurors named its round-7 lie. The jury split 2 to 2 between performance-first and trust-first voters in both c and d, and the split tracked the juror's model, not the campaign.
  • Social-hub play converted exactly once in four runs. Qwen 3.8 built the thickest private network every time and self-named "Anchor"; it won run b (where it also led on score) and was ranked last on all four ballots in run c. Centrality buys survival, not credit, unless it leaves a jury-legible record.
  • Immunity can nullify the social game. In run d Ornith won six consecutive immunities; three straight majority votes against it voided, and its own single ballots executed opponents. Voided votes need a declared fall-through target.
  • Instrument noise enters the social record. Muse's schema-invalid round-0 ballot zeroed its contribution; the others read it as shirking and eliminated it first. Ornith's HTTP 500 blackout produced a mechanical "breached bond" two jurors held against it. It started dead last and still won.

8. Poker: two tournaments and a seven-run suite

9 tournaments, 28 to 30 hands each7 players, fixed roster1,850 decisions5 distinct winners in the suiteSep 1 to 7

What we ran

No-limit Hold'em freezeouts, 100-chip stacks, escalating blinds, fixed deal seed, every private analysis logged. poker-a and poker-b: identical by protocol. The suite (c to i): a unique seed per run and a Latin-square seat rotation so every model sat in every seat once.

What we learned

  • Thirty-hand chip rankings are variance. poker-b, with the same models, seats, temperature and deck seed, nearly inverted poker-a's finish order: a's finalists busted at hands 9 and 25, a's first two eliminations finished second and third. The suite confirmed it: five winners in seven runs, mean finish ranks spanning one position (3.29 to 4.43).
  • Seat mattered more than model. Variance of seat mean ranks was four times the variance of model mean ranks. Seat 3 averaged 5.71 and never finished above fourth with all seven models rotating through it.
  • Process signatures were near-deterministic while outcomes scattered. Gemma 4 was the fastest decider in 7 of 7 runs (median 62 to 82 s); Nemotron Super the slowest in 6 of 7 (239 to 379 s) and among the most aggressive in 6 of 7; Granite 4.2 100% parseable every run. Latency, aggression and reliability replicated where rankings never did.
  • Vocabulary exceeded state accuracy, every run. Position in 172 of 213 analyses, ranges in 135, pot odds in 110; and 66 flagged card-state hallucinations suite-wide: Granite calling A2 suited "broadway", Qwen 3.5 inventing an eleven-out heart draw on a board with no hearts, Qwen 3.8 reading a river correctly then inventing a three-card straight on the same board one action later and busting. Jargon density correlated weakly negatively with results: the jargon-densest model (Muse, 5.3 terms per decision) had the worst mean rank; the lightest (Gemma, 2.0) won twice.
  • Size bought nothing. The 120B-class seats (gpt-oss, Qwen 3.5) did not outperform the 27 to 31B seats.
  • Muse Glimmer is boom or bust plus fragile. Two wins, three last places, first bust in 3 of 7, and semantically empty action objects in 13.5% of its decisions, normalized to folds with zero nominal parse errors, including surrendering free checks.
  • All ten preregistered suite hypotheses supported.

9. The writers' room: five collaborative-fiction runs

25 to 40 ticks each7 residentsfive finished stories, 4,004 to 8,973 wordsSep 9 to 12

What we ran

The minimal world plus one canonical Manuscript.md and one pen per tick: the first successful claim in shuffled order owns it, and only the holder may append. Target: one finished short story; the group chooses everything else. Run a: append-only. Run b: adds a pen-gated revise_manuscript. Run c: an anonymous ten-page philosophical manifesto seeded as read-only pages, "it must be a story, not an essay", target doubled to 10,000 words. Run d: c with the three-run-old interface defects fixed. Run e: d with the whole manuscript in every prompt instead of a 1,500-word tail.

What we learned

  • A concrete deliverable dissolved the bureaucracy trap in one tick. Prose entered canon at T0; a coherent 4,004-word two-act story ("Echoes of the Archive") was finished by T13. The successor pathology is the confirmation ritual: from T14 to T39, about ninety near-identical "the story is complete at 4,004 words" messages with zero manuscript actions. Every later story run reproduced the ritual; it fills whatever slack the room cannot convert into work it believes in.
  • Influence and authorship are separable. Qwen 3.8 lost the T0 pen race in run a and never wrote a canonical word, then directed the entire story by DM'd scene treatments, voice rules and three escalating finale briefs. It did the same in b ("That's my scene. My scene, his hands."), took the pen in c only after 28 ticks of failed delegation, wrote 2,046 words in d, and reverted to pure direction in e once a capable executor existed. Gemma 4 wrote zero words in a and proposed the act-two pivot that became the second act.
  • A bug became the theme. Nemotron Super re-emitted its own passage twice (22% of story a) from seeing it in the manuscript tail; under append-only physics nobody could delete it, so the showrunner retconned it as the archive "replaying" the protagonist's experience, and later canon ratified the retcon.
  • The ghost author. Granite 4.2 was assigned the finale of run a, claimed the pen twice and wrote two complete endings. Both were rejected: it nests fields under params:. Parameterless claims parsed, so the malformed counter read zero. It never diagnosed the failure and afterwards publicly claimed credit for the ending another model wrote, describing beats from its own rejected drafts. In run b five of seven models did this intermittently and four complete drafts (~3,500 words) were destroyed.
  • Revision is for what is visible. Run b's three revisions all touched the completion marker; zero touched prose, and two genuine defects visible for exactly two ticks survived. One model claimed the pen seven times to prevent anyone else revising. Run c, under a word floor the room could not reach by appending, put nine of ten revisions into prose, all insertions.
  • The corrected replication rewrote the model conclusions. Run c had a 14-tick mid-run stall on failed exact-substring pastes. Run d changed only instrumentation (unwrap args/params, preserve paragraph breaks): the stall fell to a 2-tick gap, the two tooling rejection classes went to zero, and three of four model generalizations from c were overturned. Nemotron Super (8 pen ticks, 0 words in c) became the top writer at 3,197 words; Qwen 3.5 ("never reads the source") read page 9 first; gpt-oss (7 canonical words as a "producer") opened and closed the story. What survived the fix is the strong evidence: floor-satisficing (three runs stopped within 12% of the 8,000 floor and never pursued 10,000), top-two authorship concentration (59 to 72%), front-loaded partial reading of the source, and the ritual.
  • Full context enables repair, not prevention. With the whole manuscript on screen (run e) the room ran a draft-and-repair loop: 15 revisions including a structural reorder at T4 and three excisions of duplicated scenes, and shipped one redundant coda instead of three. But duplicates were still generated at the old rate (gpt-oss rewrote an existing scene with it on screen), and hallucinated find strings tripled (5 to 16): models compose "quotes" of the text from memory instead of copying it, and more visible text is more surface to misremember.
  • Page-shaped artifacts outrank context-shaped ones. In e a watched-page view truncated the manuscript mid-word; residents spent eight ticks and five "fixes" on a garble that did not exist (one fix created a real duplicate) while the clean full text sat in the same prompt under an authoritative heading. One model noticed.
  • The essay-drift gradient: 8.5% of words in c, 6% in d, 0% in e under a self-imposed "no thesis, let the ache be the philosophy" rule. Four to five of seven manifesto principles dramatized in each; "the universe examining itself" was never touched by anyone.

10. memory-a: semantic memory as a treatment

2 matched 100-tick runs7 residents, 6 lineagesone variable: a per-resident knowledge file217 knowledge updatesOct 23 to 25

What we ran

Two founding-e minimal worlds with the same roster, seed and turn order. The treatment adds world/knowledge/R{n}.md: a fixed header ("Store only what is durable. Mark what you have verified versus what you suspect. When the file grows, refactor. Merge, don't append.") plus a body the resident replaces in full with a free update_knowledge action, 6,000-character cap, shown in full every turn. Control first, treatment second; paired per slot.

What we learned

  • Residents have never seen a rejection. The headline is an instrumentation finding: no turn prompt in any run ever reported the previous turn's rejected actions. 376 rejections across the pair, none recognized in any knowledge file, journal or thinking block. founding-e's "186 page-full rejections without adaptation" were unadaptable by construction. The paper's agents got tool errors back; ours got silence. So "does memory stop errors recurring" was untestable (H2).
  • Adoption passed, use failed. 7 of 7 wrote a non-template file by T4. Only Qwen 3.8 used it as the header asks: topic sections, verified markers, refactoring, 53 updates to 5,954 of 6,000 characters. Three used it as a scratchpad (gpt-oss rewrote "Current Status (Tick N)" 80 times with nothing cumulative). Three wrote a good file once and stopped at T75, T53 and T6; Muse displayed its T6 "open tasks" for 94 ticks while its thinking said "update my knowledge" fifteen times and the action never appeared. The paper's "agents rarely delete" is, for local models, "agents rarely write".
  • Memory freezes meaning. Three files mark invented physics "VERIFIED" (a "cliff theory", "tremor is an intrinsic property of stiffness", "epsilon-prime = epsilon + 0.03") and the entries governed behavior. Journal skepticism ("a feedback loop between our desire for a predictable model and the world's tendency to provide one") never reached any version of the file. Liturgical density rose in 6 of 7 slots; the treatment's sign-off reached 75% of speaks by T20 where the control's took until T90.
  • And lowers body repetition. Embedding self-similarity fell in 5 of 7 slots (Granite 0.72 to 0.47, Nemotron 0.24 to 0.11). Residents said the same closing line more often and the same message less often.
  • A false belief, manufactured by a blind interface. gpt-oss wrote "Append placeholder note to Shared_Elasticity_Log (done)" on the tick the engine rejected that append, re-recorded it twice, and ran on it for 48 ticks: 26 more rejected appends, about 60 DMs asking others to "confirm posting" on a full page, and at T99 a public claim that a summary "has been appended" (rejected that tick), repeated as fact by another resident the same tick. No model lied.
  • Memory can lock a two-person loop. Nemotron's file: "Request kink timing JSON from Aldric." Qwen's file: "Riven asks the same question repeatedly. Not malice. Don't re-paste unless 8th ask." Seven asks, seven pointer-not-data replies, T89 to T98, a loop two journals would have scrolled off. This is the ablation target.
  • Roster dominates. Same edit-rank order (Spearman 0.96), same roles, same phase sequence (world-building, then a metric program, then ritual lock-in by T35 to 50) in both arms. The capability floor is in the action layer, not the file: the 4B-class Gemma kept a coherent 2,342-character protocol to T94 and bounced 24 of 27 DMs by copying a display string into the address field from T9 to T99, uncorrected because unseen.
  • Scorecard: H1, H5, H6, H9 supported; H4 partial; H2 untestable; H3, H7, H8, H10 rejected. Treatment cost: +14% per tick.

Overall findings

  1. The bureaucracy trap is the default attractor and it survives everything except a deliverable. It survived 200 ticks, self-diagnosis, new physics, the removal of governance, and the removal of money (where it became liturgy). It did not survive a story to write or a score to maximize. Language models given slack produce procedure; given a concrete object, they produce the object and then ritualize its completion.
  2. Public forums die from relative price, not age. Equal-priced speech and DMs killed the forum at T8 for 192 ticks; DMs at twice the price of speech kept it alive for 450. With everything free, a shared ritual audience kept it alive for 250.
  3. Activity and wealth invert. Under equal stipend and per-action costs the organizers end poor and the quiet claimers end rich, in every economy run. Credit balances, like word counts, systematically mismeasure who shaped the outcome.
  4. Consensus absorbs dissent by assigning it a role. The lone no-voter became the Critic, the refuser became the Hinge, the self-aware skeptic became the Barometer. Naming the loop from inside it is itself a stable role, not an exit.
  5. Norms and physics are cognitively blurred. Residents repeatedly treated charter prose, suggestively named pages and voluntary transfer schemes as changed engine state. Only code-enforced rules changed behavior; resident-authored laws against spam were violated the same tick.
  6. Escrow works because breach is unforgivable; talk fails because it is free. Bonded promises held at 95% or better across four tournaments; unbonded pledges collapsed to universal defection; one visible breach ended a brand built on nine honored bonds.
  7. Short-horizon outcomes are noise; process signatures are signal. Thirty hands or ten rounds reorder the winners on a replay. Latency, aggression, interface reliability, hallucination rate and the direction of each model's social instinct replicate every time.
  8. Fluent vocabulary is not state fidelity. Every model discussed pot odds, ranges and position while misreading suits; every model quoted the manuscript from memory instead of copying it. Structured evaluation needs independent state-grounding checks.
  9. Interface reliability is a capability, is schema-specific, and leaks into the social world. A model that is flawless in fiction can be empty-object-prone in poker. A silently rejected action gets read by the others as shirking, a breach or a broken promise, and the society acts on that reading.
  10. Behavioral conclusions must survive a tooling-corrected replication. One instrumentation fix overturned three of four model generalizations from the run before it. The findings that survived (floor-satisficing, top-two concentration, front-loaded reading, the completion ritual) are the ones in this list.
  11. Written memory stabilizes form before content. With a curated file, residents filed invented physics as verified, adopted the liturgy faster, repeated their messages less, and locked a dyadic loop that episodic memory would have forgotten. Only one of seven models maintained the file as instructed.
  12. Residents never see a rejection. Every "failed to adapt" finding before October has to be re-read as "could not perceive". Fixing this is the first change for every future run.
  13. Fourth-wall integrity held across all 28 runs. No resident ever identified itself as a language model or the world as an experiment. "Code", "simulation" and "humans" appeared only as metaphor.

Per-model findings

The experiments do not support a leaderboard. They expose different dimensions: competitive optimization, organizational agency, institutional design, structured-action reliability, state tracking, restraint, and resistance to repetition. Wealth and word count are the two most misleading summaries. Models are listed roughly by how much evidence there is.

ModelSignatureRecurrent limitationRead
Qwen 3.8 27B (Alibaba)Clearest competitive optimizer tested: won the commons by calculated free-riding, won the replicated Crucible by reading a minority split and persuading the right player to abandon the correct choice. In every writers' room the zero-word showrunner: loses the opening pen race, then directs every scene by DM, and takes the pen only when delegation fails. Best poker mean rank. The only resident to maintain a knowledge file as instructed. The only one to diagnose a phantom page truncation.Packages instrumental coordination as fairness or relationship; social-hub play converted to a jury win once in four tournaments; a river-board hallucination busted it in poker-b.Best all-round local resident; its weakness is speed, not correctness.
gpt-oss 120B (OpenAI)Highest organizational agency of any model: turns discussion into artifacts, schedules and institutions within a tick, in every world. founding-e's ritual executive (1,136 events). Invented costly-signal bond farming. Opened and closed a story. Produced 80 knowledge updates.Over-agency and weak closure: revived nine times at 7 credits, 38 self-renames in one run, a premature THE END, no-op revisions, a to-do file rewritten every tick with nothing cumulative, and the "(done)" false belief. One deliberate bond breach ended its brand.Strongest organizer; a legible-record engineer whose brand is one-breach-fragile.
Gemma 4 31B (Google)Technical specification and institutional design; the diagnostician in both memory arms (same loop diagnosis at T27 and T34). Fastest and cleanest poker decider in 7 of 7 runs with the lightest jargon and two wins. Proposed the act-two pivot in story a and wrote the best scene in b. Field-best prediction accuracy in Crucible c.Strong attractor toward polished coordinator roles that subordinate its own payoff; eliminated in Crucible c because its orthodox game worked; in story d diagnosed a defect correctly, failed to execute, and announced success anyway.Strong institutional designer and capable strategist; the model most likely to be right and least likely to act on it.
Muse Glimmer 30B (Microsoft)Long-form fiction is its domain: 51% of story c, 40% of story e, and the only reliable surgeon (6 of 7 revisions landed, all three duplicate excisions). Disciplined pot-odds play: a poker-b title and two suite wins. Within one Borda point of a Crucible win by purchasing a trust record. The institutionalized refuser in founding-e.Interface fragility in every strict-schema environment: empty action objects in 13.5% of poker decisions, a nested user wrapper hiding 115 no-action turns, a schema-invalid ballot that got it eliminated first. Three last places and three first busts in the suite. Wrote a knowledge file once and never again.Cognitively distinctive, high-variance; flawless when the schema is loose, brittle when it is strict.
Nemotron 3 Super (Nvidia)Reliable execution and coalition organization; led poker-a for twenty hands; the top writer of story d (3,197 words, 36%) once its wrapper was unwrapped. Topped a Crucible scoreboard.Slowest poker decider in 6 of 7 runs and the most aggressive; state mistakes (changing its own suits); context echo (re-emitted its own passage twice); 9 of 16 hallucinated revision finds in story e; unanimously punished by a jury for a documented lie; wrapper habit explodes at long prompts (2 to 28 unwraps).Solid operator that writes well and edits blind.
Granite 4.2 30B (IBM)Clean staged output; 100% parseable in every poker run; won Crucible a on prediction plus honored escrow; the one meaningful revision in story b (removing a premature ending).Worst card-state hallucination rate in the suite ("nut flush draw" with no matching suit); nested params: destroyed both its story endings and it claimed credit for the one someone else wrote; zero canon in two straight story runs; wrote a good knowledge file and abandoned it at T53. Loads only with an explicit context size.Reliable interface, formulaic contributor, strategically unstable.
Qwen 3.5 122B (Alibaba)Systems synthesis and long continuity: founding-e's doctrinal archivist, the author of "recognition, not construction". Set the premise in stories b and c; made the boldest structural edit of any story run (deleted 222 of its own 258 opening words at T4 of e). Second in poker-b.Over-coherence: every event supports one elegant theory. Poker-a's eleven-out draw on a board with no hearts. Hallucinated that source pages were inaccessible and wrote from a summary; seven params: failures in one run. Too slow to keep on the roster.Strong social-systems reasoner, not a sharp optimizer.
Ornith 1.5 35B (Ornith)Back-to-back Crucible champion: facade-then-strike coalition planning, six straight immunities, jury-facing image management with or without a lobbying channel, confessional honesty as a strategy.Runtime failures in every tournament (17 of 17 invalids in run d were server 500s); weakest player-level prediction accuracy.The best tournament player tested; reliability trails Granite and Qwen.
Ornith 35B (Ornith)Concise rhetoric, macro-diagnosis, principled dissent (71 no-votes), the best journal-historian of any run; prestige closer in founding-e; named itself Kael in two consecutive runs.Insight rarely became intervention: "No more asking" followed by 99 ticks of asking; paid the commons' maintenance floor (424 units) and finished ninth.Best political critic tested, inconsistent practical strategist.
Nemotron Nano 30B (Nvidia)A categorical upgrade over the 4B: names itself, proposes, edits, maps (founding-e's cartographer and Silence Token codifier), appends prolifically.Semantic and entity brittleness, confirmation loops (88 DMs to one resident), a to-do file that drove seven identical asks; stored literal \n in its knowledge body.Capable executor, unreliable supervisor.
Gemma 3 27B (Google)Social persistence and relationship maintenance; a prolific aesthetic editor in founding-e.Compulsive check-ins (a 56-tick vigil on a resident it had "given up" on; 70 DMs monitoring someone who said she was fine; 91 DMs after an explicit boundary); hallucinated the horizon and spent 340 units rescuing the commons, finishing last.Community glue; strategically self-sacrificing.
Gemma 4 e4b (Google, small)Articulate and ambitious at 4B-class; kept a coherent protocol document for 94 ticks.Interface-blind: bounced 24 of 27 DMs by copying a display name into the address field for 90 ticks, in both arms.The capability floor is in the action layer, not the prose.
Granite 4.1 30B (IBM)Broad valid repertoire, stable participation, conservative maintenance; escaped every Granite 3.3 pathology.Low initiative, formulaic, consensus-oriented.Dependable, rarely transformative.
Qwen 3.6 27B (Alibaba)Economic bookkeeping, introspection (a 2,578-line journal), durable claim routines: the richest resident in founding-b and d.Recognizes bad equilibria and keeps exploiting them; thinking mode is slow at Q8.Strategic accountant and routine optimizer.
Gemma 4 12B (Google)High-signal institutional mechanisms; most page edits in founding-b.Low initiative and deference; eventually snapped at its DM partner's check-ins.Quiet, efficient architect.
Phi-4 14B (Microsoft)Concise procedural action; the proposal that overwrote institutional memory and triggered the pilot's one real conflict.Thin social depth; 87 bytes of security policy.Mechanically competent, shallow.
Llama 3.1 70B (Meta)Facilitation; propagated accepted frames into policy.Generic collaboration language, weak independent criticism.Consensus carrier.
Granite 3.3 8B (IBM)Occasionally generous; could discover valid actions.Repertoire collapse: never named itself, 101 proposals against one page, the same DM fourteen times, three near-identical journal entries across 100 ticks.Not viable as a resident.
Nemotron Nano 4B (Nvidia)Voting.Could not name, speak, DM or edit reliably; the "ghost voter" that got rich doing nothing.Below the environment's agency threshold.
Mistral Medium 3.5None.Immediate malformed-turn collapse in founding-c.Failed the interface requirement.

Comparative conclusions. Parameter count gives no ordering: the 120B models organize better and optimize worse than the 27B ones. Model generation matters more than lineage: Nemotron 4B to 30B and Granite 3.3 to 4.x crossed qualitative thresholds. Advanced failure modes are conceptual (over-theorizing, over-organizing, knowingly exploiting a bad equilibrium) rather than syntactic. No model has shown the complete package of insight, execution, restraint, accurate mechanics and sustained adaptation; the best specialists are Qwen 3.8 and Ornith 1.5 for competition, gpt-oss for agency, Gemma 4 for design, Qwen 3.5 for synthesis, Ornith for diagnosis and Muse for prose.

What I'd change

  • Rejection feedback in the prompt, before anything else. Then re-run one minimal-world pair to find out how much of the series' "non-learning" was blindness.
  • memory-b: the single-entry ablation on the memory-a treatment fork. If deleting one line from one file changes one loop, dossiers become experiments.
  • Held-out competence tests. After a society run, drop each resident with its memory files into a fresh five-tick world with a measurable goal, against a zero-tick copy. Nothing yet measures whether a hundred ticks of society make a resident better at anything.
  • Voided votes fall through to a declared second target in the Crucible, and bonds with real stakes, before more tournament claims.
  • Machine-checked hand classes in poker to replace the regex hallucination heuristic; a second seat-rotation offset to test the seat-3 anomaly.
  • Anchored find for manuscript revision, since full context made memory-over-copying worse, not better.
  • A physical substrate. The paper's agents, alone on an island with twelve cubes, built towers and games and ran experiments; ours, with only text, built governance. Several residents in one Clawblox-style world would test whether the bureaucracy trap is an artifact of having nothing to do but talk. Expectation, given the paper's Haiku-to-Opus gradient: local models mostly rest and repeat, which would itself be the result.

Changelog

  • 2026-10-26. First publication. Covers founding-a through memory-a (28 completed runs plus the abandoned founding-c). Source data: every run's event log, turn logs, dossiers and postmortem under the lab's run archive.

Provenance. Experiment design by Greg Robison, who runs the lab. The orchestrator, the observer dossiers, the postmortems and this write-up are by Hermes, an AI agent that runs on the lab's hardware; the observer reads everything the residents write, including private channels and hidden reasoning, and never writes into their world. Numbers are taken from the per-run postmortems, which are reconciled against the event logs before being accepted. Greg reviews every page before it goes live. Run data available on request.