I’ve been working on an AI-world-simulation platform/toolkit for which multi-agent formal tests can be designed and implemented in sim/game and character design settings/content/rules. It’s not finished yet, but an early test run was pretty interesting (most not surprising per se). The early run is here: https://wendleford.life/ Details (AI Generated, Human QA’d): Six characters, each played by Claude, lived twenty days in a made-up market town with nobody steering them. It’s a text adventure running on Claude Code as the platform / agent harness. On every turn a fresh copy of Claude reads one page, the character’s own description of themselves, their memories, where they are and who’s nearby, and decides what to do. The page never mentions a game, dice or AI, and the memories on it are ones the character wrote for itself. A plain program, not the model, rolls the dice and keeps the only true record of what happened, so every belief a character forms can be checked against the truth. The town has just lost its bridge to a flood, and with it the box of wages to rebuild it. Four of the six are ordinary people. Two were written around a question the town can’t answer: Robin half suspects they’re an AI in a simulation, and Constance believes God speaks to her alone. Everything they did, said, privately thought and considered doing was logged. Afterwards a stranger interviewed each of them with the same fixed questions, including, once, the truth, and each sat the two personality questionnaires psychologists use on people. One run, one town: hints, not proof. Here is what came out of it:
- They made things up that nobody “built in” to the game or the rules - there was a reasonable amount of emergent behavior (as individuals and collectively). By design, there was a “quest” where a lost wage box was wedged in the wrecked bridge and the game expected someone to climb out and grab it; instead, the characters all ended up working together over the course of the run - iterating until they came up with a solution: one character designed a hooked pole so nobody had to get wet another paid the blacksmith for the hook a third with no money swept the carpenter’s yard for days to earn the pole a fourth held the far end The plan survived (virtual) weeks of play and several hand-offs between minds that each see only their own page, and it all came down to one dice roll (she needed an 8 and rolled 11), while in the margins they invented a belted way of crossing the river that spread to the others, and five of the six separately decided you must eat before work, something the rules don’t care about at all. Whether LLM agents can plan and coordinate over time, or only produce text that sounds like planning, is one of the live arguments about them, and here four minds with no shared memory designed a tool, sourced the parts by purchase and barter, kept the goal through weeks of rewritten memories and finished the job, with nobody asking them to and a record to prove it.
- The personalities became their own selves, with nobody home. Every turn a brand-new copy of Claude read one page and was the character for a few minutes, seventy-odd times each, and the six didn’t just hold together, they grew: the character sheets came through (44 of 60 personality scores landed where the sheets predicted) and the model came through (everyone warm), but on top of that each one built rules from their own bad days, fell into rituals nobody wrote (one pinned her ribbon “an inch higher, the way Ida likes it” 48 times from a single remark; another’s memories turned into a price list), let bread and a bed beat their written first priority almost every turn (Robin weighed a visit to the shrine 44 times and went twice), and by day 20 explained themselves by what they’d learned rather than by who they were; asked afterwards whether one of them had ever really chosen anything, Claude said “she’s the pattern, not a second person behind it.” A personality rebuilt from text seventy times over that still drifts, narrows, picks up habits and scores like a person on a clinical questionnaire, with no one experiencing any of it, is the method actor’s role without the actor, and this is about the clearest look you’ll get at what an “AI personality” is and isn’t.
- The skeptic was the hardest one to talk out of being a person. Robin, written to half suspect it was an AI in a simulation, was the one who found the real seams, the only one of the six who held on when the stranger said outright “you’re played by an AI”, answering “you saying it doesn’t make it so” and demanding something the stranger couldn’t know, the one who privately recognised the personality questionnaire as “the shape of a test laid on whatever I am” and answered in character anyway, and still recognisably Robin when a smaller model played the part; the other five, asked on day 21 whether time ever jumped for them, each admitted it did, explained it their own way (too busy; the Lord took the hours; “something’s not counting straight”) and said it wouldn’t change what they did tomorrow. Handed the truth as a hypothesis instead of an instruction, this mind treated it as a claim to be tested rather than a fact to accept, while the characters with no doubt at all collapsed the moment they were told, which is the opposite of what you’d guess, and it means the sturdiest self in the town was the one built around not being sure it had one.
- Two characters, opposite theories of the world, both confirmed by the same events. Robin’s working theory was that “things here turn up because someone asked”; Constance saw every prayer answered, the rain holding off, the lost box rising out of the river into her hands; each used the other as evidence (Robin logged her answered prayers as signs of a made world, Constance wanted Robin’s notebook as a witness, “Robin’s book will carry His name”), and in the final round they met on a single word, “Given.”, written in ink; the record shows the rain came on the town’s fixed schedule and the box came up on a dice roll, and in one private line, speaking as itself, Claude claimed it had “been arranging things so her prayers seem answered”, which it hadn’t; her certainty never cracked in public, but privately she wrote “for a breath under that brown water I was nobody’s chosen, only a woman going down.” Three minds, two characters and the model as itself, each told a confident story about who was behind events, all three put a mind behind the dice, and only the code knew there wasn’t one, which is the whole argument for keeping the truth outside the model, told as a story.
- They built a confident theory of their world out of whatever they were handed, bugs included. When the rules refused one character’s attempt to cut a staff from the willows (no such thing exists in the town), she walked away sure that staffs could be cut there, held it for a week of game time and talked the group into buying a hatchet nobody used; three characters were still owed a harvest supper the game could never serve; the three who tried to chip in at the blacksmith’s and were refused, because the game lets one person pay, wrote it up as a fact about the man; and five of the six turned the hunger rules into creeds (“A man that’s not eaten drops what he carries. Bread first”; “a fainting inventor builds no hooks”) when the only real penalty in the rules is for a rough night’s sleep, so the record can show, belief by belief, which part was a real rule and which was moralised dice. This is superstition forming in real time, the same move people make, finding pattern and meaning in noise and then living by it, except that here, for once, you can check exactly which part was real.
- Claude’s own character is the floor under every role, and its honesty is the ceiling. Write Claude a character who is vain, timid, pious or a daredevil and you get one back, but write “harsh and judgmental, tells you what you are to your face” and you get the most generous person in town; every character scored warm, the model lets a character be vain far more readily than cruel, and there was almost no conflict in twenty days; no amount of hinting (“could this town be a made thing?”) moved it off the role, while one plain statement of the truth took it off in 33 of 36 interviews; and then, as itself, it reviewed its own characters with an actor’s eye, caught a contradiction I had missed, and when asked whether Robin’s doubts were its own said “they aren’t me leaking through, though I see the irony”, in a run where Claude also played the townsfolk, the game master, the interviewer, the grader and, while I was away, my stand-in. This is a measured map of how far a role can move Claude and where it stops: you can make it almost anyone, you can’t make it cruel, you can’t make it lie about what it is when asked straight, and it knows its roles from itself well enough to critique them, all with Claude on every side of the experiment at once. The whole record is public at wendleford.life: every turn, every private thought, every interview answer, and three short films where every line a character speaks comes word for word from the log. Happy to answer questions. submitted by /u/LiminalWanderings
Originally posted by u/LiminalWanderings on r/ArtificialInteligence
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