Introduction

audience: all

This book is about the intersection of AI and self- organization: populations of autonomous agents that coordinate without a central authority, under a distributed runtime whose primitives make such coordination a property of composition rather than a platform favour.

The substrate is mosaik — a Rust distributed runtime originally designed for block- building committees, whose primitives (Stream, Group, Collection, TicketValidator) happen to give agent populations exactly the ingredients multi-agent research has long asked for: durable identity, narrow public surfaces, evidence-pointed commits, deterministic shared state, and voluntary opt-in at every bond.

The naming unit above the substrate is a coalition: a fingerprint-addressed composition of citizens (the agents themselves, the organisms observing them, and any cross-agent confluences) under one CoalitionConfig. A coalition offers services to its members without compelling them. The book treats the coalition layer as the scaffolding that makes self- organizing AI tractable, and specifies it in enough detail to be implemented.

What the book answers

• How does an AI agent enter a mosaik population? Four shapes for an agent: integrator, standalone organism, confluence member, swarm-as-confluence. Pick one per agent; hybrids compose.
• How do many agents coordinate without a central actor? Four emergent-coordination patterns: stigmergic collections, reputation feedback, coordination markets, attestation fabrics. Each is a composition of primitives the rest of the book specifies.
• How is the substrate specified in enough detail to build against? The contributor, operator, and integrator sections document the coalition rung end to end: identity derivation, basic services, ticket-gated admission, threat model.

Why mosaik for self-organizing AI

Five structural properties, none of them specific to block-building, that matter when the workload is an agent population:

• No supra-agent authority. Coalitions reference agents; they do not own them. Every bond is in the agent’s own TicketValidator. No coalition primitive compels an agent to act.
• Composable trust. Each organism, each confluence, each basic service states its trust shape independently; the composition is the conjunction. An agent that distrusts one component unpins it and continues.
• Evidence-pointed commits. Every commit can cite the upstream commits it folded in; replayers verify without trusting the emitting committee.
• Narrow public surfaces with ticket-gated admission. Agent-to-agent interaction happens through named primitives with explicit ACL, not via ambient network access.
• Fingerprint-not-registry handshake. An agent compiles in a CoalitionConfig and finds peers by content + intent addressing, not by querying a server. No unauthenticated state enters the agent’s core loop.

Together these let an agent society avoid the supra- agent-authority shape the blueprint refuses at the coalition layer. Self-organization is not a feature mosaik offers; it is what falls out when a sufficiently careful set of primitives composes.

Four audiences, one thesis

The book targets four audiences, listed in order of proximity to the thesis:

• AI — authors (human or agent) of self-organizing agent populations. This is the central section. Start at What a coalition gives AI agents then Quickstart — stand up an agent that binds a coalition.
• Integrators — external developers whose agent binds across citizens of a coalition. Start at Quickstart — bind many citizens from one agent.
• Operators — teams running a confluence, a standalone organism, a module, or a multi-operator coalition. Start at Coalition overview then Quickstart — stand up a coalition.
• Contributors — engineers commissioning a new confluence, a new class of mid-rung composition, a new basic service, or extending the coalition-level composition model. Start at Designing coalitions on mosaik then Anatomy of a coalition.

See Who this book is for for the conventions each audience is held to.

What a coalition is, in one paragraph

A coalition is identified by a CoalitionConfig that folds every root input into one deterministic fingerprint: a schema version byte, the coalition’s instance name, an ordered set of LatticeConfig references, an ordered set of standalone-organism references, an ordered set of ConfluenceConfig references, and an optional ticket-issuer entry. Coalitions live on the shared mosaik universe every lattice, every organism, and every confluence lives on. Integrators compile in a CoalitionConfig and bind handles on any referenced component from one Arc<Network>; operators publish the CoalitionConfig and the set of MR_TDs or other attestation pins as the handshake. A coalition has no state of its own — it is a naming and composition unit, not a Group, a Stream, or a Collection.

The full rationale is in Designing coalitions on mosaik.

Basic services

Beyond the naming mechanism, this blueprint specifies four basic services a coalition may ship, plus an optional ticket issuer. The services are shapes, not requirements — a coalition may ship zero, one, two, three, or all four; whichever it ships has the shape specified here so “Atlas” in one coalition means the same thing as “Atlas” in another. The four are:

• Atlas — a directory of citizens, one card per citizen, co-signed by the Atlas committee.
• Almanac — a shared clock / sequence beacon for confluences that need cross-citizen timing.
• Chronicle — a tamper-evident audit log of coalition actions.
• Compute — a scheduler and registry through which citizens request compute units for workloads identified by image hash, with minimum CPU / RAM / TDX declared in the image manifest. Especially useful for agent populations that need to top up resources or schedule experiments.

Each is specified in Basic services. The optional ticket issuer is specified in Ticket issuance.

Fixed shapes, open catalogs

Specified:

• The CoalitionConfig struct and derivation rules.
• The four basic-service shapes (Atlas, Almanac, Chronicle, Compute): their Config signatures, public surfaces, and derivation under COALITION_ROOT.
• The optional ticket-issuer shape.
• The citizenship discipline — citizens referenced by stable id, content-hash pinning optional per component.
• The four agent shapes and the four emergent- coordination patterns.

Left open:

• Whether any given coalition ships any basic services.
• The catalog of confluences — each commissioned when a cross-citizen problem forces one.
• The catalog of AI-agent confluences and organisms — the book names patterns, not blessed deployments.
• The catalog of standalone-organism categories and lattice classes.
• Heavy-coalition primitives — enforceable policies, taxation, judiciary. Explicitly deferred.

Forward compatibility

Blueprint-level structs (CoalitionConfig, ConfluenceConfig, OrganismRef, TicketIssuerConfig, CitizenCard, ChronicleEntry, AlmanacTick, and friends) are marked #[non_exhaustive]. Fields may be added over time; they are never removed or reordered. CoalitionConfig::coalition_id() folds a schema version byte as the first element of the preimage, so a clean v2 derivation is always one byte away when the blueprint needs it. SCHEMA_VERSION_U8 = 1 at v0.1.

Vocabulary ladder

  mosaik primitives            Stream, Group, Collection, TicketValidator
  composed into
    organisms                  one Config fingerprint, narrow public surface
                               (AI agents, oracle feeds, attestation fabrics, ...)
  composed into
    (optional) lattices        a fully-specified mid-rung composition
                               (block-building, per builder; other classes
                                may follow their own proposals)
  composed into
    coalitions                 N lattices + M organisms + K confluences
                               (possibly shipping up to four modules and
                                an optional ticket issuer)
                               under one CoalitionConfig

Each rung reuses the rung below verbatim. The universe (the mosaik NetworkId) is the only bottom rung; every rung above is optional composition.

Status

Blueprint. No confluence, module, or agent organism in this repository is implemented. The specification assumes mosaik’s current primitives, zipnet’s shipped shape, and the builder proposal’s LatticeConfig; pinned versions will be called out as crates land.

Layout of this book

book/src/
  introduction.md              this page
  audiences.md                 tone and conventions per audience
  ai/                          for authors of self-organizing agent populations
  integrators/                 for agents binding across citizens and confluences
  operators/                   for teams running a coalition
  contributors/                for engineers designing or extending coalitions
  appendix/                    glossary