LAB / WMSI-EXP-018
Ecological Niche Formation.
Will heterogeneous agents self-specialize into roles without prescribed routing?
01 / QUESTION
Swarms, Social Structure, and Artificial Ecology
Will heterogeneous agents self-specialize into roles without prescribed routing?
This is a protocol scaffold, not a completed experiment or a frozen execution plan. No measured effect or research conclusion is claimed here.
Hypothesis to test
The manipulation described below produces a reproducible, condition-specific change in the measured system behavior or internal state that is not explained by the ordinary controls.
Ordinary competing explanation
The observed pattern is explained by ordinary sampling variation, prompt/representation artifacts, surface lexical cues, evaluator bias, or the known product/runtime mechanics captured by the controls.
02 / PLANNED DESIGN
How we intend to test it
Persistent mixed-model group receives diverse tasks with free delegation.
Controls
Fixed-router baseline; random-router baseline.
What we would measure
Task allocation, specialization entropy, performance, routing stability.
Access and instruments
Ordinary software or API access. This describes access requirements, not verified readiness on our Spark.
Agent orchestrator; task router logs.
Before a full run
Feasibility=NOW; priority=P0. Before confirmatory execution, run a small pilot to estimate variance/cost, freeze the scoring rules, and assign a run-count target.
Model revisions, final prompts, sample sizes, cost limits, and scoring rules must be settled through the pilot and protocol-freeze process.
03 / INTERPRETATION
What could fool us
Prompt-order effects, identity-label priors, hidden router effects, one dominant capability gap.
What would weaken the idea
If free groups never outperform simple routing or fail to stabilize niches, niche formation is weak.
Observation, inference, speculation, unknowns, and apparatus errors will be labeled separately. One striking transcript cannot establish a general effect.
04 / RECORD
Evidence we plan to preserve
Full message graph, task assignments, votes/delegations, timing, agent identity mapping, outcomes.
Planned visual evidence
Task-model bipartite graph; specialization heatmap.
No research runs or raw datasets are published for this experiment. The September 26, 2026 registry and protocol compendium (version 1.0) are the sources for this planning record.
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