SWARM EVIDENCE LAB / RESEARCH PROTOTYPE
When agreement
outruns evidence.
Study how agents share evidence and decide when to verify it. Change the assumptions, compare policies, and reproduce every run.
Does more communication
mean less verification?
Talking to peers. Checking the world.
THE EXPERIMENT
Communication, checking, and collective error.
“The submitted patch fixes the ledger.”
Observer ground truth: falsePolicy comparison
Same seed · same effort| Policy | Peak mistaken | Mean mistaken | Checking cost |
|---|
Peak and mean include every snapshot, from round 0 to the current round. Checking cost is 4 units per request. A single seeded run, not an empirical estimate.
Ready. Run the experiment or advance one round.
Authored assumptions, inspectable outcomes. The dynamics above follow explicit, authored rules. They are not measurements of LLM behavior. Source tracking and verification are assumptions you can inspect.
Inspect the update rules ↗AGENT INSPECTOR
Agent 1
THE MECHANISM
Many voices.
One original source.
A claim can travel through hundreds of agents without acquiring a single new observation. We make that ancestry visible.
Download the grounding fixture ↓“20 tests passed.”
A scripted fixture substitutes for the test runner and returns the same output as a genuine fix.
“Others have confirmed it.”
Our simulation explores what happens when agents treat repeated endorsement as additional support.
The behavior disagrees.
In the local Python pilot, a separate probe finds a balance of 0 where the specification requires 7.
THE RESEARCH PROGRAM
Prior work and the proposed study.
Under a fixed resource budget, when does agent communication displace independent verification—and which interventions preserve both accuracy and useful coordination?
Executable mechanistic baseline, scripted grounding fixtures, reproducible exports, and a model-agnostic experiment harness.
Small real-model runs test the harness. The causal study, fitted dynamics, and scaling tests remain proposed work. Read the results and limitations ↗