SwarmWorld: Stigmergic technological evolution in societies of language-model agents

Key points

Despite having no roles, recipes, or central control, identical agents spontaneously differentiated into exploration, construction, maintenance, and coordination behaviors, as confirmed by clustering on 15 behavioral features.
It measured objective functionality judged by a simulator rather than LLM self-reports, using an evaluation setup that removed all agents before applying 8 unannounced perturbations.
Compared with isolated exploration, the shared world yielded +1.2 to +6.0 more verified inventions and consistently better resilience metrics in paired comparisons across 4 seeds.
Technology reuse most often began with firsthand observation of artifacts made by others, rather than through chat.
Explicit cultural mechanisms such as teaching (TEACH) increased collaboration and organization, but their functional gains varied by evaluation metric and time period, making them no universal solution.

External research summaries. These are not HDATF publications or measured product results.