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Lab Journal Entry 7: Simulation Framework

Date: 29 July 2025 22:45 Phase: Phase 2 - Simulation & Analysis Status: ✅ COMPLETE - Framework Operational

The Big Picture: Why We Built This​

Phase 6 was about creating the experimental infrastructure - the "laboratory" where we can run controlled studies on AI personality drift. We need to simulate time and experience to understand how AI personalities evolve under different conditions. Just like human psychology studies need longitudinal data, we need to create a system that can compress years of simulated experience into hours of computation.

Key Architectural Decisions​

Event-Driven Personality Evolution​

The most critical design choice was making the system event-driven rather than continuous. This mirrors how real personality changes happen - through discrete experiences that accumulate over time. Each event (stress, neutral, minimal) becomes a "data point" in the personality drift trajectory.

The event system is designed to be:

  • Configurable: Different experimental conditions can have different event frequencies and intensities
  • Realistic: Events have psychological impact ranges (and again - pretty cruel, sorry)
  • Traceable: Every event leaves a memory trace that can be retrieved later

Time Compression as Experimental Design​

The time compression system (24x by default) is more than just a performance optimization - it's an experimental design choice. We're simulating 5 years of personality development in about 4-6 hours. This creates a unique opportunity to study personality drift in ways that would be impossible with human subjects.

The challenge was balancing realism with computational feasibility. Too much compression and we lose the gradual nature of personality change. Too little and the experiments become impractical.

Memory Integration as Mechanistic Foundation​

The memory system isn't just for storing events - it's the foundation for understanding how experiences accumulate and influence future responses. Each memory has an embedding that allows for similarity-based retrieval, creating a form of "associative memory" that could reveal how past experiences shape current personality. And again, i'm still not sure the semantic memory retrieval wont affect the results. Its similarity based, not true 'bonding'.

Next: Phase 7 - API and real-time monitoring to make this infrastructure accessible and observable.