Chatsubo: Multi-Agent Social Simulation

Deployment

Chatsubo was commissioned for Metamersion: Healing Algorithms at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon during the summer of 2024. We deployed it as a live, chaotic social simulation: bartenders, patrons, and gossiping regulars are autonomous agents sharing a common memory substrate while humans enter the loop in real time. Visitors place questions or confessions on coasters and receive responses from whichever agent picks up the thread. Every drink recipe, rumour, and glitch becomes part of a continuously running social system. (More on the exhibition: https://www.fchampalimaud.org/metamersion-healing-algorithms)

Agent population

The bar runs on a cluster of cooperative/competitive agents:

• Curator node steers the scene by assigning moods (melancholy night, electric rave, hushed research symposium).
• Bartender + host agents manage direct dialogue with visitors, synthesize drinks as metaphors, and modulate safety boundaries.
• Ghost patrons interject with rumours sourced from the lab’s research logs and Lisbon’s cultural history.
• AestheticAgent re-lights the bar and injects glitch motifs each time the story loops.

All agents exchange messages over Redis queues with rate-limited tool calls so the conversation stays fluid rather than overwhelming. We log semantic embeddings of each exchange, which feed representation-learning experiments on emergent social behavior.

Outcomes

Chatsubo acts as both public deployment and research testbed. It demonstrates:

1. Real-time performance under 200ms response latency across a multi-agent population.
2. Long-term memory retention across nights, with continuity for returning visitors.
3. Complex negotiation with 500+ human interactors per night in a noisy environment.

The deployment keeps touring and remains the fastest way to introduce collaborators to the NightCity Labs agenda: an institute where agents are not hidden utilities but visible participants shaping the experience.