One shared memory that keeps fading, three minimal agents, no boss — and a story that outlives every note that carried it.
TL;DR: Give a few bare-bones agents nothing but a shared notepad that constantly fades, and they spontaneously build a culture — a story they keep alive together, long after any single note has decayed to nothing. No coordinator, one tiny rule. Runs on a laptop.
The setup
Three agents share one whiteboard. Every tick, everything on it fades; a note left alone dies in ~4 ticks. Each tick an agent scribbles a noisy observation, and a swarm agent also reinforces whatever's currently strongest. That's the whole rule. It's stigmergy — how termites build cathedrals by reacting to each other's mud (Grassé, 1959) — and the same dynamic that lets populations of agents settle on shared conventions (Perez et al., 2024).
The 10-second version
