Emergent Culture in Minimal LLM Systems
Simon Jones, Sabine Hauert
cs.NE cs.AI cs.CL cs.MA nlin.AO q-bio.PE
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.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.