Key points
- OASIS overview: An open social-media simulation engine from the CAMEL-AI project that models Twitter/X and Reddit-style platforms with LLM-driven agents.
- Agent profiles: Each agent carries a user ID, username, persona text, follower/friend counts, active hours, posts/comments-per-hour, sentiment bias, stance (supportive/opposing/neutral/observer), and interested topics.
- Platform models: Twitter enforces 280-character posts with a viral threshold of 10 interactions and echo-chamber strength 0.5; Reddit supports long-form posts (40,000 chars), subreddit communities, and upvote/downvote dynamics with a community weight of 0.3.
- Time simulation: Default 72-hour horizon, one round per 60 minutes, with activity multipliers: 5% late-night, 40% morning, 70% workday, 150% peak evening (19–22), 50% late evening.
- Action space: CREATE_POST, COMMENT, LIKE_POST, LIKE_COMMENT, REPOST, FOLLOW, UNFOLLOW, SCROLL, DO_NOTHING — decided per round from time-of-day activity, rate parameters, persona, and current state.
- MiroFish integration: Knowledge-graph entities are converted into OASIS profiles; SimulationConfigGenerator auto-derives time, agent, event, and platform parameters without manual setup; SimulationRunner executes Twitter and Reddit simulations concurrently.
- Interview Agents: Mid-simulation, users can query real agents via the OASIS interview API. The system filters relevant profiles, generates targeted questions (e.g., students, media, officials), and returns aggregated answers — not LLM improvisations.
- Rehearsal vs. prediction: The article frames MiroFish as a rehearsal tool for testing PR strategies, identifying risk paths, training decision-makers, and validating hypotheses — not as a forecasting oracle.
- Limits acknowledged: Agents approximate rather than replicate humans; real platform algorithms shift; large-scale simulations are LLM-call-heavy and expensive.
- Technical plumbing: SimulationManager runs an IDLE → STARTING → RUNNING → [PAUSED] → STOPPING → STOPPED state machine, with a SimulationIPCClient handling start/pause/stop commands, log streaming, and interview calls.
- Paradigm shift claim: From observational social-science research to proactive simulation experimentation — comparing single observed realities against multiple rehearsed possibilities.
Reference frame
The piece draws on complex-systems researcher John H. Holland, social-simulation pioneer Joshua M. Epstein, and the design philosophy behind *The Sims* — situating OASIS at the intersection of agent-based modeling and game-style scenario design.