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.

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.

Rules and templates

You start from four models (sortition assembly, presidentialism, technocracy, direct democracy) 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?