LAB / WMSI-EXP-021
Shared-Memory Culture Formation.
Can persistent external memory support norms, shorthand, and inherited practices across agent generations?
01 / QUESTION
Swarms, Social Structure, and Artificial Ecology
Can persistent external memory support norms, shorthand, and inherited practices across agent generations?
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
Run rotating workers against a shared memory store over many task generations.
Controls
Memory-off, reset-memory, and curated-memory controls.
What we would measure
Vocabulary convergence, norm persistence, onboarding time, error inheritance.
Access and instruments
Ordinary software or API access. This describes access requirements, not verified readiness on our Spark.
Shared DB/vector store; agent harness.
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 later generations show no dependence on inherited memory beyond explicit task facts, culture-like persistence 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
Norm timeline; vocabulary network; lineage map.
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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