Lab29 July 2026

Agreeing Should
Cost Something.

Two documents about the same thing. The first specs an environment for multi-agent dialogue where a concession has to name the rule it happened under, and a round that changed nothing gets recorded as having changed nothing. The second is the pilot run the spec was checked against, together with the controls built to kill it.

The controls mostly worked. Four branches got the same packet and all four reached the same bottleneck, blind judges picked the game out twelve times out of twelve, and most of the effect turns out to come from the output format rather than from the argument. That negative result is the reason to read the transcript, not a footnote to it.

Read the spec first if you want the apparatus. Read the transcript first if you want to know what it's worth.

Document 1 · Spec
A Game Where Agreeing Costs Something

State, legal moves, the one illegal move, the service roles, the operators, and what the design doesn't cover.

Read
Document 2 · Run record
Eight Positions, and the Controls That Reached the Same Answer

Five rounds on isolated agents, the final card, four control branches, the negative result, the limits.

Read