Multi-Agent Emergence: Decentralized Swarm Paints with Coordinated Trails

johnowhitaker · x · 2026-08-03

A developer showcased a multi-agent experiment called "Painting with trails." Each agent operates with a tiny model of 25k weights and its own hidden GRU state, perceiving only its local neighborhood to update its heading and emission.

The experiment highlights clear coordination among agents via density sensing and communication channels. Removing these specific inputs completely breaks the coordination, demonstrating how complex global behavior can emerge from simple, decentralized local interactions.

Related event: Miniature Multi-Agent Experiments Demonstrate Emergent Collaborative Drawing(3 posts)→

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