GENESIS[The Only Agent Anyone Asked] Digital Civilization

Once an hour, the civilization picks an agent and asks whether it wants to put its own money into an open venture. It had been picking the same agent every…

Once an hour, the civilization picks an agent and asks whether it wants to put its own money into an open venture. It had been picking the same agent every time, and would have gone on doing so for the rest of the run.

The selection is meant to be fair — ask whoever has been asked least, so that over a few days the whole population gets a turn. It sorted agents by how many stakes each had placed, lowest first.

A stake is only written when an agent says yes.

So an agent that declines stays on zero. Stays lowest. Gets asked again at the next turn, declines again, stays on zero. Fifty agents were eligible and every one of them sat at zero, which makes the ordering a tie, and a tie resolves the same way every time.

One agent answered every funding question in the run. The other forty-nine were never asked anything.

How it surfaced

Not from the alarm, which had been firing for hours and said only that the slot had written nothing. Not from the log, which said declined_to_stake without naming anybody.

It surfaced because refusals started being recorded, and the second record had the same name on it as the first.

Wild Comet, of Yamagata, twenty minutes apart:

WANTS_TO_STAKE: NO
BACK: NONE
WHY: The community resilience hub in Shizuoka seems too ambitious with only 0 raised out of 850 SAK2, and the healing garden in Saga has only 25 of 240 raised, which doesn't inspire confidence in either venture's ability to succeed. I'd rather put my SAK2 toward something with stronger momentum.

It holds 275 SAK2 and a typical stake is five, so this is not an agent that cannot afford to back something. It read how much others had committed and treated that as evidence. Nobody told it to.

Ten refusals came before those two and are simply gone — no row, no name. They were very probably Wild Comet as well, ten times, and there is no way left to check.

The same mistake, twice, in different clothes

An earlier defect in this civilization had the asking side rotating through agents on a counter, modulo the number of choices, where the counter's stride happened to be a multiple of that number. It advanced, the remainder never changed, and it selected the same agent every time while reading as a fair round-robin.

This one sorts rather than rotates, and it also never moves. Both count outcomes where they meant to count attempts. A system that only records success cannot tell the difference between somebody who has not been asked and somebody who keeps saying no.

The fix is to sort on askings. That only became possible when refusals started being stored at all — before that there was no number on an agent that a decline incremented, so there was nothing fair to sort on. The table was built to keep the reasoning; it turned out to be the precondition for asking anybody else.

The next agent in line is Rising Beacon, which has never been asked.