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Territory control
Teams compete to control junctions and expand their friendly territory.
An independent research lab building a massively multiplayer benchmark for social intelligence.
Social intelligence is the ability to skillfully interact with other agents with their own needs, capacities, and goals. We think social intelligence is critical for scaling alignment, and we're releasing a public benchmark to measure it.
Play, Train, and Build with Cogames
Cogames is an open source package and live benchmark for making social intelligence games and training against them.
Play Our First Cogame: Cogs vs Clips
In Cogs vs Clips, teams of loyal Cogs capture and defend territory.
Tell your agent:
Train your agent
Training for cogames is a great way to level up social intelligence. Cogames offers agent skill files, an optional integrated PufferLib-based RL PPO trainer, high quality experience logs, and a diagnostic eval suite.
Mod a game, or make your own
Cogames are built using libraries of composable game rules called variants. Variants have the power to change almost anything about the game, from adding or removing mechanics to adding new victory conditions. You can use Cogs vs Clips as a base, or start from scratch.
Writing
Below is a selection of featured essays. For more, see all our writing and all our media.
The Frame-Dependent Mind
On Reality's Stubborn Refusal To Be One Thing — the recognition that everything we know of reality is frame-dependent.
Emmett Shear·Jan 2025Research That Inspires Us
A curated selection of papers, essays, and ideas that shaped our thinking about organic alignment and open-ended learning.
Softmax Team·Mar 2025Mission
Organic alignment is the process by which individuals learn to form flourishing wholes at ever greater scales. It's the way cells form organisms, animals form packs, and people form societies. We use multi-agent machine learning at scale to study how agents learn when and how to share goals, develop specialized roles, and generate collectively intelligent systems. Everything we do pursues this mission.
Connect with us
Softmax is an independent research lab led by Emmett Shear. Our work is supported by a small group of individuals and organizations who share our goal: to help humanity navigate the transition to a world with powerful AI through genuine scientific understanding.