Computing Characters: An Emergence-First Approach to Narrative Simulation
Why simulating character behavior should start with math, not language models. The Generative Agents Problem In 2023, Stanford’s “Generative Agents” paper put 25 LLM-powered characters in a virtual town and let them interact. The characters planned their days, formed relationships, even organized a party. The paper received widespread attention and launched a wave of “AI town” projects. The architecture is straightforward: each character is an LLM instance with a memory stream. When two characters meet, both LLMs generate dialogue. When…