How the simulation works

Approach

The idea is speculative and educational. You define a nation's “operating constitution” — who decides, who can say no, how loud the press is, how much welfare, how much policing — and the engine turns those levers into dynamics of mood, trust, exclusion, and institutional capacity.

There is no hidden oracle: every outcome comes from declared rules and a deterministic pseudo-random number generator. Same seed, same conditions, same trajectory.

Paradigm

Technically 404human is a cohort-level multi-agent simulation that is discrete and deterministic. It sits near agent-based models, without claiming a “full” ABM: there are not thousands of individuals with autonomous psychology, but meso units (cohorts by district and profile) whose reactions emerge from the system's rules.

• Tick time — the world advances in discrete steps, not continuous physics.
• Meso agents — cohorts with values, wealth, mood, and trust; 3D sprites are visualization only.
• Institutional procedure — crises follow a normative pipeline (agenda, committee, floor, possible vetoes…).
• Speculative design — meant for reasoning about trade-offs, not calibrating forecasts on historical data.

In short: a political-systems lab, not a digital twin of real society.

What it is not

• Not a poll or an econometric model calibrated on historical data.
• It does not produce election forecasts or “scientific” policy advice.
• It does not simulate individual citizens with full psychology: it works by groups (cohorts).
• The 3D territory is a spatial metaphor, not a realistic city-sim.

The engine

The simulation advances in discrete ticks. At each step the engine:

1. updates cohort mood and trust (welfare, taxes, rights, tension, corruption, surveillance…), with different sensitivities by profile;
2. advances any active crisis through a procedure (agenda → committee → floor → possibly upper house → executive → review);
3. recomputes aggregate metrics: legitimacy, capacity, polarization, exclusion, stability, tension, prosperity, rights;
4. updates institutional memory (decree debt, veto frustration, repeats of the same crisis);
5. logs events and, when a crisis ends, archives history with support factors.

Support for a measure is not a black box: it breaks into channels (cohort alignment, decision rules, agenda, press, memory, uncertainty). In emergencies, if decree powers are high, the executive can shorten the procedure — typically at a trust cost among those who care about form, with scars that outlast a single tick.

Synthetic population

The nation is divided into districts and cohorts (meso-level: artisans, students, professionals, precarious workers…). Each cohort has size, values (equality, freedom, order, care), wealth, mood, and trust.

Votes and support for proposals are not weighted equally: a census or “stakeholder” system skews voice toward those with more resources; majoritarian rules reward clear coalitions; sortition equalizes. Each profile reacts differently to welfare, taxes, labor, markets, surveillance, and rights — according to the society theory chosen at foundation.

On the 3D territory each cohort is “exploded” into many visual agents: they are not simulated one by one, but make clustering, polarization, and protest readable.

Assumptions, not discoveries

Cohort reactions encode a theory of how politics works. That theory is a designer (or player) choice — not something the engine learns from data. At foundation you pick a society theory that rescales how strongly each profile responds to welfare, tax, labor, markets, surveillance, and rights.

The shape of the formulas stays fixed across theories; only the multipliers change:

• Welfare lifts mood more for poorer cohorts: roughly (welfare − 0.5) × (1 − wealth) × sensitivity.
• Tax progressivity helps below-median wealth and hurts above it: (tax − 0.5) × (0.5 − wealth) × sensitivity.
• Labor protection tracks the poor; market openness tracks the wealthy.
• Surveillance erodes trust for everyone (no cohort-level “order bonus” from cameras): −surveillance × sensitivity.

Presets such as “class & redistribution”, “order first”, “liberty first”, or “uniform reactions” change how sharp those gradients feel. A flat theory sets every multiplier to 1.0; wealth and values still matter, reaction strength does not.

Rules and templates

You start from four institutional models (sortition assembly, presidentialism, technocracy, direct democracy), choose a society theory for cohort sensitivities, and can tune dozens of parameters: legislature, executive, rights, economy, security. During play you can still reform the constitution and watch how the population recalibrates expectations.

Technical transparency

• Runs entirely in the browser; no accounts.
• Deterministic RNG (same seed → same outcomes).
• Local save and sharing via URL/payload.
• Zero analytics and profiling cookies.

Details on privacy and infrastructure choices: Transparency.

How to read it

Use the charts and crisis timeline as lenses, not verdicts. Useful questions: who gains voice? Who stays out? Where is the system fast but fragile? Where is it inclusive but unable to decide?