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The swarm

The swarm is a multi-agent nanoeconomics engine embedded in Scelo. It does two things:

  • Convenes a council of simulated professional agents to deliberate over a forecast — surfacing consensus, dissent, and reasoning (it does not decide; it surfaces inputs so you can). The forecast models a community; when the scenario isn't one (a fund's allocation, a reserving estimate, a model result sent from Scelo), the council judges the scenario as stated instead.
  • Simulates a population's response to a medical or social shock, scaling micro outcomes up to macro impact (workdays lost, GDP drag, mortality, cost).

You reach it two ways:

  • From Hard Data → Convene council → Open in swarm (the pipeline route).
  • Directly from the swarm view in the workspace.

The swarm: the pet rail — one animal per surface — beside the council, with eight professional agents landing a stance over three rounds. The animated illustration needs JavaScript.

The surfaces — and their pets

Navigation is the pet rail down the left edge: six animals, one per surface, and the animal is the only thing that identifies it. The active pet grows a step and wears its name in its own colour; the others step back to icons. The cat sits slightly apart — the Canon is the corpus the other surfaces read from, not another view of the run.

Pet Surface What it shows
bunny bunny Forecast The WMTR survival projection: wealth trajectory, survival curve, outcome distribution, M/T/R components (or, for a scenario that isn't a community, why there is none, above the council's verdict)
dog dog Council Reactions The deliberation graph + a readback Sankey (profession → trust the forecast, or the scenario? → confidence)
hamster hamster Society Pulse How a broader simulated society reacts
turtle turtle Readback The synthesised narrative of the council
chick chick Simulation Population simulation of a scenario → macro impact
cat cat Canon The reference works injected into every agent's prompt

The pets are alive. Each one breathes, sways and blinks — with the odd double blink and, rarely, a wink — and its eyes follow your cursor, but only so far: a pet glances at the pointer rather than staring it down. Hover a pet and it leans in, curious; the chosen one is happy, and hops when you pick it. The bunny that greets you on an empty swarm follows the cursor too, and twirls if you click it. If your system asks for reduced motion, the pets hold still.

It runs as its own server — started for you

The swarm is a self-contained app (apps/swarm in the Scelo repo) with its own server. Scelo IDE bundles it and starts it with the app on a loopback port, and stops it on quit — nothing to launch by hand. See Running the swarm for where it lives, its data and log, and the checkout (dev) mode.

Inside Scelo IDE the swarm wears the IDE's theme, so a dark IDE frames a dark swarm. The theme button in the swarm's own header decides: auto, the default, follows the IDE, while light or dark pins that theme.

Tip

The swarm is a decision-support cockpit. The agents report; the actuary decides.