Generative agents · Stanford-style
A society that writes itself.
Polis is a town of AI agents. No scripts, no dialogue trees — each agent remembers, reflects, forms relationships and makes its own choices. Watch a culture emerge, then drop an event into the world and see it ripple.
Each agent sees its world.
On every tick an agent observes its location and who is nearby. Those raw observations become timestamped memories — the atoms everything else is built from.
A memory stream, scored and retrieved.
When an agent needs to act it doesn't dump its whole history into the prompt. It retrieves the handful of memories that matter, ranked by recency × importance × relevance — the exact scoring function from the Generative Agents paper.
Retrieved memory becomes behavior.
The agent conditions on its persona + retrieved memories to choose an action and, when someone is close, a line of dialogue. Warm words strengthen a bond; sharp ones fray it. Relationships are never hard-coded — they accumulate.
Low-level memories fold into insight.
Once enough has happened, the agent pauses to synthesize its recent life into a higher-level reflection — "I value the people who show up for me" — which is written back into memory and shapes future choices. That feedback loop is where personality comes from.
05 · The world is yours
Step in and change history.
Launch the live town, click any agent to read its mind, and inject an event — a stranger with gold, a storm, a festival — then watch the society metabolize it.