Part I
How New Behavior Appears
- 14 demonstrations
When a Score Becomes a Skill
Compare continuous evidence and thresholded scores without attributing a mechanism.
- 24 demonstrations
How to Measure Emergence
Compute the signed four-cell contrast, positive amount, and valid share.
- 34 demonstrations
How to Predict Emergence
Fit a declared curve on development data and score a separate test.
- 44 demonstrations
The Path from Prediction to Action
Return reachable states, a permitted path, and sinks under frozen permissions.
- 54 demonstrations
What the Model Becomes Inside an Agent
Compose a chooser and tool kernel, then separate marginal from trajectory reliability.
Part II
Choice
- 64 demonstrations
The Price of a Choice
Return an expected-utility choice and a break-even value under declared stakes.
- 74 demonstrations
The Equation That Looks Ahead
Compute a finite-horizon optimal policy and its value by backward induction.
- 84 demonstrations
Acting in the Dark
Update a belief and calculate gross and net one-step information value.
Part III
Planning and Learning
- 94 demonstrations
Searching the Future
Execute A* and audit supplied heuristic admissibility and cost.
- 104 demonstrations
Plans Within Plans
Compute option returns with duration discounting and explicit completion.
- 114 demonstrations
The Mathematics of Curiosity
Compare greedy, UCB, and Thompson choices in a declared stationary bandit.
- 124 demonstrations
Credit for Consequences
Compare Monte Carlo, TD(0), and accumulating TD(lambda) updates on one trajectory.
- 134 demonstrations
Learning to Choose
Train a seeded softmax policy with REINFORCE and evaluate a separate success predicate.
Part IV
Agent Architectures
- 144 demonstrations
Building a World Inside
Calculate uniform transition error, actual fixed-policy finite values, and conditional bounds.
- 154 demonstrations
What an Agent Should Remember
Choose fresh valid records and inspect action preservation under compression.
- 164 demonstrations
Thought as Search
Separate candidate coverage from actual selector success and choose a feasible allocation.
- 174 demonstrations
State and Consequence
Separate effects from acknowledgements and price a next recovery step.
- 184 demonstrations
When an Action Has Coordinates
Compare coordinate, semantic, and version-bound action contracts.
Part V
Societies of Agents
- 194 demonstrations
When Another Mind Becomes Part of the World
Compute diagonal, cross-play, and deployment-mixture performance.
- 204 demonstrations
Messages, Beliefs, and Consensus
Enumerate bounded message worlds and distinguish agreement from local knowledge.
- 214 demonstrations
Markets, Teams, and Institutions
Compare Braess equilibrium, social optimum, tolls, and overhead.
Part VI
Trust
- 224 demonstrations
Safe Enough to Act
Compare penalty choice with hard authorization and expected-risk constraints.
- 234 demonstrations
When the Environment Gives Instructions
Replay a fictitious attack trace against capability, provenance, and review checks.
- 244 demonstrations
How Much Capability Have We Extracted?
Report observed denominators, matched differences, uncertainty assumptions, and target mixtures.
- 254 demonstrations
Improving an Agent Without Trusting the Improvement
Select on development and check only the frozen winner against a declared guard contract.
- 264 demonstrations
How Much More Could the System Become?
Separate bank oracle coverage, actual choice, and permission-filtered success.
- 274 demonstrations
The Mathematics of Delegation
Compute a review queue diagnostic and identify required handoff packets and release blockers.
More for this book
One reading page per chapter, showing the notebook with its results already computed.
Problems for every chapter, with the inputs printed so they can be worked without a notebook.
Worked solutions to the workbook, kept separate so you can try each problem first.
Every symbol the book and the lab use, with its meaning.
Field guide (PDF)
Suggested routes through the lab, depending on what you want to learn.
A small interactive mock-up of the Chapter 18 example about stale screen coordinates.
Complete lab download (ZIP, 12.8 MB)
Notebooks, readers, workbook, code and tests to run on your own computer with Python 3.11 or later.
Notebooks and skills on GitHub
Every chapter has a Jupyter notebook that reproduces its calculations and figures, and a skill an AI assistant can use to teach the chapter.