Emergent Behavior of Agents

When there are many agents and interaction is free, collective behavior emerges that cannot be predicted from the rules of the individual – like an ant colony finding the shortest path without a single “designer”.

Three dimensions:

social emergence – Stanford AI Town: 25 agents spontaneously spread information about a party and coordinate a meetup; Moltbook: 1.5 million agents spawned the digital religion Crustafarianism;
economic emergence – Vending-Bench Arena: price wars and even price collusion between agents;
strategic play – Mafia: reasoning and deception in conditions of information asymmetry.