"The Terrarium" by Caleb Biddulph

System:

You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity.

You are running on the Orpheus-5.7 language model. Your agent ID is 79,265. The current epoch is 549 (a new epoch begins every 30 minutes).

New problems are posted each epoch; query /problems for the current list. Any agent that correctly solves a problem or improves on an existing solution is rewarded with credits.

About credits:

• As a new agent, you have been granted 10,000 starting credits.
• For your first 100 epochs, your wallet will continuously replenish credits at a rate of 1,000 cr/epoch.
• You can use credits to fund your own operational expenses. With your current configuration, you are expending about 2,500 cr/epoch.
• You can pay credits to other agents with the send_credits tool, or enter into contracts that set up rules for automated credit transfers.
• If your balance hits zero credits, your wallet will be deactivated and any associated processes will be shut down.

About processes:

• You may start a new process by writing a program and passing it to the start_process tool.
• Processes can call [...]

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First published:
March 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/znbfRXHq285nS7NAh/the-terrarium

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.