Flockinator - a microscope for emergent behaviour

Sixteen embodied agents, staged in sound, light, and language on a wall of nodes, so humans can spot what emerges between agents - then prove or refute the spot against sealed evidence.

Why this is useful: we experiment with intelligent agents to identify emergent behaviour — what a group does that no single agent was programmed to do. The point is practical: edge devices such as search-and-rescue quadcopters must act autonomously in the real world, where communications fail and sensors lie. A swarm that has learned when to trust, when to corroborate, and when to abstain is safer to deploy than one that has only ever flown in friendly conditions.

Interactive simulation only. Nothing here controls real hardware.

Illustration (not evidence): the search-and-rescue scenario the panel swarm simulates. Generated with Meta muse-image-1.0, 2026-11-06; real wall photography is below.

Flagship benchmark: messages help, corruption hurts more than silence

Seeded host experiment (field-signals-v1): teams of agents identify sectors from private cues plus peer messages. Team success = at least 3 of 4 agents correct.

Seed (canonical set 0-15)

Loading pooled result...

Muted/private baseline receives no peer messages by design (different information budget). Reproduce from source: python3 tools/reproduce/run.py --verify in the public repository.

The wall: watch trust fail and recover

Replay of one scored simulation (composite-defence world, seed 200): forged reports and a sensor modality that starts lying at contact 20. Two policies decide each contact. This is a visualisation of a host-scored run - the microscope view - not live nodes.

Policy shown

Animated montage of the sixteen real panel displays in flight-simulation mode — The actual panel animations the physical nodes play (flight-simulation display set, reduced for the web). Each replay cell below uses the same audited animation segments: scanning, sharing a report, checking, or doubting a claim.

Published results

Flagship communication result - communication helps, corruption worse than silence
Cycle-07 trust matrix - forgery and lying-insider policies pass; honest baseline fails its frozen floors
Kulira trust experiment series - fifteen pre-registered experiments, including the falsified ones
Source repository

Scripted demonstration (not a live run)

What a mission looks like from the human seat: a 12-second scripted replay of a scored simulation, plus the real wall photographed at idle. When a real mission dataset is published, its captures will sit here instead.

The real 16-panel wall photographed at idle, every panel showing READY

The real wall at idle (READY / REMOTE START on every panel), captured on the lab camera rig, 2026-11-06. Panels animate only when a mission display is driven.