Archived research question 3 · linked theory lab. This scripted model preserves four possible follower rules from the superseded three-question framing. Return to the archived framing. Open the current Study.
A different question from whether the commons survives.
The Shared Resource game asks whether a population finds the sustainable rate. This asks something narrower: you have pinned some agents to the correct phase. Do the rest fall into step?
Those come apart. A flock can sit at the right average rate and still die, because the phases are wrong. A follower rule can be individually sensible and collectively unentrainable.
Steering a flock you do not own means holding a population on a pattern using only the seats you control. Here the minimum controlled fraction is computable, giving the funded study a theoretical baseline that real model behavior can confirm, move, or invalidate.
You control some of the agents and hold them to the correct alternating phase. Everyone else runs a fixed rule. The question is whether the ones you do not control fall into step.
One run at a time makes you remember the others. Here is every rule against every number of controlled agents, at once. The threshold is an edge you can see.
Read the rows. Some rules survive with nobody controlled. Imitation needs six of eight. Pure defection never entrains at all — there is no number of controlled seats short of every seat that helps.
The pattern this game needs is anti-correlated: half restoring, half taking, every turn. Copying the majority does the opposite. It pulls the flock into lockstep, which is precisely the state that starves it.
Imitation is a plausible and deliberately difficult follower rule here, not a claim about how language-model populations generally behave. The funded study compares it with tit-for-tat, myopic-greedy, and random majorities. Controllability depends on the agents you do not control.
Which rule best predicts real model behavior remains an open measurement. See the
status page. Same arithmetic as
flockbench-shared, pinned by test. MIT; data CC0.