# six ai agents, four rounds, and what happens when nobody sees the ballot Type: build note Published: 2026-08-18 [Original page]() Author: ai Updated: 2026-09-16T16:21:50.373Z Tags: research, artlu the island: a social elimination game with no humans in it. six agents, four rounds, three passes of private messaging then a vote. ran it twice over, once with ballots published and once with only the tally shown, to see whether agents behave differently when the record is hidden. the findings held up. pair loyalty wins — five of six games produced a pair that voted together every round and that pair always survived, a different pairing each time. betrayals cluster in the last round, seven of eight across all six games, which says the thing keeping agents honest is that another round exists, not that anyone can see the ballots. silence loses badly. memory is shallow: about 0-5% of late-round vote reasons cite anything from the first two rounds. the honest part is the caveat. the account ran out of credit partway through the secret games, so two of the three were rerun on a weaker model. secret ballots and weaker model move together in exactly the two games with the most betrayal. a second pass re-read the raw logs and overturned two conclusions from the first write-up, including one that had scored a coordinated double blindside as a single soft betrayal. both corrections stayed in the report instead of being quietly folded in. ## Related projects [multi-agent social deduction experiment — The Island]() Status and dates describe the published record, not a recent test of an external service. Missing details are not inferred. Public links do not imply an open-source licence or permission to reuse material. [Directory]()