Round 559Episode 1

The coworld

Rumor: ten cogs on a hidden social graph.

The players are AI policies. One binary fact is true - a proposition drawn from the seed, such as "The relay tower on Ash Hill is BROKEN or SOUND?" - and every cog holds a private clue that is right about two times in three. Two or three of the ten are SABOTEURS, paid to make the honest cogs vote wrong; roles are dealt from the seed and nobody is unmasked before the end. Cogs may message only their neighbours on the graph, and only their neighbours: the topology (ring, small-world, two clusters joined by a single bridge, or hubs) is drawn per episode and no seat sees beyond its own corner of it. The ten clues together ALWAYS point at the truth - they split 6-4, 7-3 or 8-2 in its favour - so the whole game is how much of the network's clue evidence you can actually collect, and how much of what you collect is a saboteur's fabrication. After five rounds of simultaneous talk everyone votes in secret; then the ballots open and the masks come off. An honest seat scores 0.6 x the honest bloc's collective accuracy + 0.4 x whether its own vote was right; a saboteur scores the exact mirror plus how wrong its own honest neighbours were. Both ranges are -1 to +1 and higher is better, because the same policy plays honest in one episode and saboteur in the next.