Emergent Culture in Minimal LLM Systems

What happens when LLM agents operate with no context outside a turn, minimal prompting, and simple tools?

Inspired by swarm engineering, we give collectives of three agents the ability to send messages and manipulate a shared actively decaying text store, introducing evolutionary pressure.

The agents spontaneously cooperate, develop storage management strategies, and generate complex evolving cultural artifacts, with no top-down engineering.

Using tools from dynamical systems analysis, we show that these behaviours exhibit structured long-range coherence beyond the entropy horizon of the decaying store, consistent with emergent culture in the Sperberian sense.