Thousand Token Wood: shipping a multi-agent economy on a 3B model

Thousand Token Wood is a project developed for the Build Small Hackathon, featuring a simulated economy where five woodland creatures act as agents within a 3-billion-parameter model, Qwen2.5-3B, to trade goods, manage resources, and respond to market dynamics. The simulation, accessible via a Gradio app and utilizing vLLM on Modal, demonstrates the challenges and successes of using small models for real-time multi-agent systems. Initially plagued by issues such as self-sufficiency and a lack of trading incentives, the simulation was improved by introducing engineered scarcity through mechanisms like diet variety, spoilage, and a winter fuel crisis, which created market pressures and wealth disparities among the agents. Despite the model's limitations in economic reasoning, enhancements through structured prompts enabled more realistic trading behaviors, while the incorporation of historical market events as "Wood Legends" added dynamic storytelling elements. These adjustments showcase the potential of small models in simulating complex systems, emphasizing the importance of thoughtful design and scarcity to generate engaging and emergent economic interactions.

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