an opinion dynamics laboratory
Free exploration. Tune the confidence bound and watch consensus or division.
8 opinion puzzles across 3 difficulty tiers.
AI-assisted hypothesis testing with statistical analysis.
Each node is a person holding an opinion on a single issue, drawn as a point on a blue-to-red scale. People only influence neighbors whose views are close enough to their own, set by a confidence bound. From that one rule the network slides toward consensus, splits into rival camps, or shatters into many small echo chambers.
The simulation runs bounded-confidence opinion models, Deffuant-Weisbuch and Hegselmann-Krause, over Erdos-Renyi, Watts-Strogatz, Barabasi-Albert, and lattice networks. Optional confirmation bias and committed zealots reshape who ends up persuading whom, mirroring how social structure and stubborn minorities steer collective belief.
social is one experiment in the petri-labs collection of small interactive simulations of emergent systems.