I Gave 3 AI Agents a Decaying Notepad and They Built a Culture

Cisco senior software engineer Shridhar Shah demonstrated that three minimal AI agents sharing a decaying notepad spontaneously built a persistent culture—a shared story that outlived any individual note. The agents, governed only by a stigmergy rule where they reinforce the strongest current observation, maintained a coherent narrative for 100 ticks even though the original note decayed within four ticks. Shah argues that persistence becomes a property of the agent society, not of any single agent's memory.

One shared memory that keeps fading, three minimal agents, no boss — and a story that outlives every note that carried it. TL;DR: Give a few bare-bones agents nothing but a shared notepad that constantly fades, and they spontaneously build a culture — a story they keep alive together, long after any single note has decayed to nothing. No coordinator, one tiny rule. Runs on a laptop. Three agents share one whiteboard. Every tick, everything on it fades; a note left alone dies in ~4 ticks . Each tick an agent scribbles a noisy observation, and a swarm agent also reinforces whatever's currently strongest. That's the whole rule. It's stigmergy — how termites build cathedrals by reacting to each other's mud Grassé, 1959 — and the same dynamic that lets populations of agents settle on shared conventions Perez et al., 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08882 . | ❌ Each on its own | ✅ The swarm | | |---|---|---| | A shared story exists | 11% of ticks | 100% | | Same story tick-to-tick | 3% | 99% | pad observation += 0.3 everyone adds a little noise if imitate: the entire "culture" rule: leader = strongest pad reinforce what the group already backs pad leader += 1.0 every note decays each tick Tick 0: group rallies around "water down" Tick 100: group still holds "water down" ...but that original note faded to ~8e-31 within a few ticks. It survived only because the agents rewrote it 300 times. The story is 100 ticks old; the note that started it has been gone since tick ~4. What persists isn't any note — it's the meaning , re-inscribed by the group. It's the Ship of Theseus: no original plank left, yet the ship sails on. Reseed and a different story wins — the agreement is what's real. We keep trying to fix agent memory with bigger storage. This says a group of forgetful agents can hold knowledge no single one could, just by reminding each other. Persistence becomes a property of the society . These agents can't remember much alone. Together, on a whiteboard that won't stop erasing itself, they keep a story alive as long as they care to. That's culture. git clone https://github.com/Shridhar-2205/secret-lives-of-agents cd secret-lives-of-agents/02-emergent-culture && python demo.py Shridhar Shah — Senior Software Engineer on the AI team at Cisco. GitHub https://github.com/Shridhar-2205 · LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shridhar-shah-220b1721b/ Sources & further reading:Stigmergy Grassé, 1959 — the biology of indirect coordination · Park et al., 2023 · Perez et al., Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior 2024 . Cultural Evolution in Populations of Large Language Models