Emergent Culture in Minimal LLM Systems
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Computer Science > Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Title:Emergent Culture in Minimal LLM Systems
Abstract:What happens when LLM agents operate with no context outside a turn, minimal prompting, and simple tools? Inspired by swarm engineering, we give collectives of three agents the ability to send messages and manipulate a shared actively decaying text store, introducing evolutionary pressure. The agents spontaneously cooperate, develop storage management strategies, and generate complex evolving cultural artifacts, with no top-down engineering. Using tools from dynamical systems analysis, we show that these behaviours exhibit structured long-range coherence beyond the entropy horizon of the decaying store, consistent with emergent culture in the Sperberian sense.
| Comments: | 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication at Alife 2026 conference |
| Subjects: | Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO); Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.30668 [cs.NE] |
| (or arXiv:2606.30668v1 [cs.NE] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.30668
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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