Field notes

Three hundred agents hold opinions on one spectrum. Each instant, an agent looks at every voice within its tolerance radius — and drifts toward their average. That is the whole rule. Everything else is emergent.

Slide the tolerance dial and a genuine phase transition appears. Wide tolerance: everyone is in everyone's radius, so the room melts into a single consensus. A middle band: two stable camps form, far enough apart that neither is in the other's radius — so they stop hearing each other, and never move again.

Narrow tolerance: the room shatters into a dust of tiny, deaf splinters. Nobody chose to disagree — the geometry of who-can-hear-whom did it for them. This is why good people, all reasoning honestly, can lock into opposed views: it is the locality of listening.

Turn up echo pull and each camp is dragged toward its own pole. The disagreement doesn't grow — it hardens, sliding to the extremes. That is what recommendation pipelines do to a split that already exists.

The bridge brush paints agents with a very wide tolerance who are trusted by both sides. A surprisingly small number of them — fewer than twenty — can re-connect camps that had fallen out of earshot and rebuild consensus. A dashed gold line marks each settled camp; fainter dotted lines sketch where the same math (ignoring bridges) says new camps will settle.

Controls: drag the tolerance dial (←/→). Drag an agent across the spectrum to seed a dissenter. Toggle Bridge and drag to paint bridge-builders. The preset chips tween the dial into each phase.