The culmination. A finite population of agents (genotypes, L loci) evolves
on a rugged NK landscape that IS reality (knowledge/dynamic_society.py),
composing the four operators the whole study built toward: grounding,
directed recombination (sex), quality-diversity selection, and mutation.
Grounding is made load-bearing via the consensus-conformity (self-
consumption) mechanism (GG decision): selection acts on
g*true_fitness + (1-g)*conformity, where conformity = agreement with the
population's own consensus, so at g=0 the society optimises fitting-the-
crowd rather than reality.
4-arm ablation (12 reps), each breaking distinctly, only the full society
climbing (global_opt ~ 0.79):
- full 0.78 climbs to the optimum, diversity maintained longest
- no_sex 0.77 can't recombine to escape local optima
- no_diversity 0.74 greedy: collapses diversity fastest, worse local optimum
- no_grounding 0.48 self-consumption collapse to an unfit consensus
(trains on the crowd -> confident-but-wrong mean;
conformity-true gap ~ 0.5)
This integrates E1-E6 + the learning kernel + E7-E10 into one system and
shows the Lamarckian society needs ALL of grounding + directed sex +
diversity: on a rugged landscape you need diversity to explore basins, sex
to recombine them, and grounding to select on reality -- remove any one and
you fail differently. Closes the C3 vertical claim analytically; the LLM
rung remains the eventual empirical instantiation.
New: knowledge/dynamic_society.py, configs/layer1/E11.yaml, figures/
plot_E11.py, README, tests/test_dynamic_society.py (+5). kind:
dynamic_society dispatch; make layer1 wired. 122 tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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| README.md | ||
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The Lamarckian Society — Layer 1 (analytical core)
A parametric population-genetics model of knowledge transmission across generations of
learning agents. Knowledge transmission is modelled literally as a Wright–Fisher
process (not by analogy): a model's knowledge is a distribution p_t over K discrete
items; a fixed true distribution p* has a rare tail; each generational step is
"sample from the parent (drift) + mix in fresh real samples (grounding/immigration) +
refit." Model collapse is the loss of rare alleles under drift.
See paper/blueprint.md (the normative build spec) and
paper/the-lamarckian-society-v4.md (the perspective paper).
Reproduce
Environment is a uv venv built from the committed, hash-pinned uv.lock — that
lockfile is the single source of truth for "it runs" (Layer 1 is pure NumPy/SciPy and
bitwise-reproducible from a seed; no container needed).
# one-time: install uv (https://astral.sh/uv)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv sync # build .venv from uv.lock
make test # correctness + scientific-validation tests (the spine of trust)
make layer1 # run experiments E1–E6
make figures # regenerate figures from committed results
Layout
src/knowledge/ Layer 1 package (imported as `knowledge`)
configs/layer1/ one YAML per experiment (E1..E6)
figures/ plot_EX.py — read results.parquet only
tests/ test_correctness.py + test_scientific_validation.py (analytic checks)
paper/ blueprint.md, perspective paper, figure_manifest.md
results/ written artifacts (gitignored; hashes tracked in manifest.json)