Who knows whom, cheaply
Every relationship is one number in a capped per-person map, written at midnight from the day's company: an evening at the same table, a shift at the same bench, a pew, a basket at the door, a fist. None of it is ever sent over the wire.
A social graph over four hundred people is a hundred and sixty thousand potential edges. Storing that per-person and streaming it would dominate both the memory and the frame, for information almost nobody looks at.
The cheap version
- One number per pair, not an object.
- A capped map per person, so a villager remembers the people who matter and forgets the rest, which is also true of villagers.
- Written once at midnight from the day's company, not on every interaction.
- Never sent in frames. The sheet endpoint labels a person's ties when you open them, and only then.
- Kin and spouses are not in it at all. Those come from the lineage, which is authoritative.
What the numbers buy
Strangers have no entry, and that absence is load-bearing. One evening in five a person calls on a friend's hearth instead of the inn, help goes to friends first, and courtship prefers people you already know. A person's sheet reads their circle back as words: spouse, kin, sweetheart, friend, colleague, acquaintance, bad blood, enemy.
It is also how a childhood scrap turns into a grudge two decades later without anyone modelling grudges.
The general point
Social memory is the part of an agent simulation that looks like it needs a database and does not. A capped integer map, written on a schedule and queried on demand, gets you nearly all of the behaviour for nearly none of the cost.
Read next
Households, marriage, birth and death
The household is the unit. Everyone has parents, children, a surname, a purse and a larder; people court, marry, take a house, have twins or triplets, feud, sicken, are jailed, die, and are buried in the churchyard their kin visit on Sundays.
A closed medieval economy, in real time
Two villages of about 220 people each run a complete production chain, field to mill to bakehouse and pasture to butcher, with floating market prices, daily wages, household purses, tax, tithe, and a winter every twelve days.
Four hundred agents, a few dozen guts
The village asks the model about roughly thirty people on a cadence, plus anyone at all who is facing a real choice, capped at two calls a second across the whole valley.
Trust, heat and standing
Three quantities carry the politics. Trust is private and pairwise, heat is how much attention is on you, standing is what the room thinks of you, and only trust can buy an alliance.