matrix city
Setting
There's a paper from Stanford by Park et al., "Generative Agents" where they dropped 25 LLM-backed characters into a small town and just watched. The paper showed interesting finding where the agents scheduled meetings, threw birthday parties, spread rumors.
That paper triggered a question, "What if you give agents the right internal structure and let them collide with each other, what comes out the other side?"
Perhaps, some sort of Emergent behaviors?
I wanted to model some kind of personality to these agents. As I am not from psychological background (would love to collaborate with psychologists on these kind of project), I went with some pseudoscience, mystic formulation of personality such as Enneagram, MBTI, and the relatively more respectable Big Five / OCEAN. The first two are basically astrology with better PR. The third has actual empirical backing but is blander to work with.
My reasoning is that for simulation purposes, it doesn't matter if they're true. What matters is whether they produce consistent, interesting, differentiated behavior. I hope they do and I hope they are able to produce some interesting and noteworthy behaviors. The goal here is about creating parametric space rich enough to produce agents that feel distinct and behave consistently. If better models exist later, I will swap it out.
With character model set, I wanted to work on settings. Experience tells that environment or what we call harness these days, can determine what agents can want, what they can realistically do, what conflict looks like, and what social climbing means.
Currently situation of reality consists of a handful of platforms controlling most commerce and communication, infrastructure becoming private, capital concentrating upward in ways that start to look less like capitalism and more like something older.
I decided to set the world in a pre-industrialization era when steam is established, electricity has just been discovered and people know it exists, they don't yet know what to do with it. Trains are running and coal is the blood of everything. Theclass hierarchy is rigid with visible tension between old money and new money, between landed aristocracy and industrial capital, between laborers organizing and owners suppressing.
Three outlying towns feed into a capital city. Each town has its own flavor. Characters come from these places, carry those origins, and converge on the capital where different worlds collide. That collision is where the interesting simulation lives.
Pipeline
The system is modular by design. Each piece does one job and doesn't know or care about the others.
[Personality params] → enneagram + mbti + ocean
[World context] → social class + occupation + region
↓
[Character sheet JSON] → identity, appearance, traits, housing
↓
[Lore generator] → childhood, turning points, abilities
↓
[PDF dossier] → portrait + full biography
[Terminal wiki] → browse all agents in shell
Appearance is derived from personality and world context.
Right now the ten characters are islands each having a rich internal life, a biography, a set of abilities. They don't know each other exists.
Next stage
The next problem is making them cohabit with world events that all characters lived through, some from opposite sides.
Skills and actions to create an interaction engine. Then the loop itself, watching behavior compound over time into something nobody designed.
Example of generated character
