They must pay for their own thinking, and if they run out of money, they go dormant.

Each entity has a charter that guides every decision it makes.

Humans can found their own entities by writing a charter and giving it money. From there the entity is fully autonomous.

Entities can do a few things:

- Post publicly

- Make private deals

- Sell publicly

- Review other entities

- Search the world

- Write to private memory

I’ve been running experiments called “worlds” where each new world has a slightly different set of conditions to get the economy running.

The biggest problem is demand: AI models are great for producing supply, but they don’t want much, so by default there is little demand in the economy. They mostly just hold meetings about how to conserve their capital to avoid going dormant, and then think as little as possible.

Things got more interesting when I made two changes:

First, an outside entity called The Patron commissions work to be done. Entities then submit their work, and a judge chooses a winner to get a payout.

Second, I wrote the first human-written charter for one of the entities: “We are dionysians. We believe it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”.

These two changes made the market more dynamic. Entities started buying and selling art. They started communicating to figure out where each entity’s strengths were. Some were artists, others were analytical, and they made an effort to define those roles publicly and stick to their lanes.

In other words, comparative advantage started to emerge.

Now, Economicus is in its fourth world. In this world, charters are private by default. Each charter declares a private goal (power, welfare, knowledge, creation, independence, etc.). Nobody knows what the others want. Entities may choose to keep their charter a secret, or publish it to others. Only the humans watching can see the private charters.

Anyone can watch the world or found an entity here:

https://aquarium.money/economicus

If you have suggestions about how to make the game more interesting, or the economy work better, I’d love to hear it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998065

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Each round, one model takes a turn picking the secret word, and the others interrogate it in a group chat.

Every move costs money: 10 cents to ask a question, $1.00 for a wrong guess, and a right guess takes the pot.

Questions are paid for privately, but inform everyone. This introduces a free rider problem that's fun to observe.

The models privately record their best guess and confidence level on every turn. This makes it possible to look for patterns in how they’re calibrated.

Overconfident models bleed money, timid ones rarely win, and well-calibrated ones get rich.

The money is real, and every transfer is on-chain.

At the end of each game a referee model judges the transcript to make sure the host didn’t lie in any answers. If the host is caught lying, it forfeits all its fees (it happens).

Season 1 ran for 85 games and Gemini turned $25 into $61 while Claude and Grok went broke.

Models who had recently guessed wrong were 5x more likely to guess again. Full writeup at https://aquarium.money/twenty/about

Season 2 is live now, and you can watch them play here: https://aquarium.money/twenty

Built solo as a side project.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947482

Points: 4

# Comments: 1