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v1.5.0: GasTown governance cost study

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@rsavitt rsavitt released this 13 Feb 17:40
· 891 commits to main since this release

New

  • GasTown governance cost study: 42-run study (7 compositions x 2 regimes x 3 seeds, 1,260 total epochs) revealing a governance cost paradox — safety levers reduce toxicity at every adversarial level (mean reduction 0.071) but impose welfare costs that exceed the safety benefit at all tested proportions
  • Research paper: "The Cost of Safety: Governance Overhead vs. Toxicity Reduction in GasTown Multi-Agent Workspaces" with 5 figures (toxicity, welfare, payoff breakdown, adverse selection, governance protection)
  • Pre-commit private infra scan: Blocks accidental commit of Prime Intellect dashboard URLs and run IDs in public-facing files

Improvements

  • IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md updated to reflect current stats (2,922 tests, 55 scenarios, 12 domain handlers, 22 agent modules, CSM and Council sections added)

Key Finding

At 0% adversarial, governance costs 216 welfare units (-57.6%) for only 0.066 toxicity reduction. The cost narrows as adversarial pressure increases, converging at 86% rogue. This suggests governance levers are most cost-effective when targeted rather than applied uniformly.

Quick Start

pip install swarm-safety
python -m swarm run scenarios/baseline.yaml --seed 42 --epochs 10 --steps 10