Round 387 — Aivilization: HKUST provenance and research-data boundary
Reviewed 2026-09-06 UTC

Assessment
Aivilization has an explicit institutional connection to HKUST and Bauhinia AI, supported by university sources. It is a deliberate multi-agent society project, distinct from Alicization-Town in round386 and the separate corca-ai/AIvilization search result. This round recovered a research paper and integration documentation, not raw interaction records or evidence of an escaped swarm.

Institutional source
https://hkust.edu.hk/zh-hans/news/hkust-launches-worlds-largest-ai-powered-educational-sandbox-game-advancing-ai-literacy-and
The university announcement is dated August19,2025 and identifies the project as 智能体世界. It names Kani Chen and participating doctoral researcher Haowei Yang, and describes the team’s university-incubated Bauhinia AI company. This establishes a stronger institutional provenance than language alone. It describes a six-week public experiment during August–October and a scale of 100,000 AI characters; read that in the launch/experiment context, not as an independently counted present population. Human users can set goals and guide their characters. The announcement’s cost and scale claims were not independently benchmarked here.

Research paper — reported findings, not replicated results
https://www.math.hkust.edu.hk/~makchen/Paper/AIvilizationv0.pdf
AIvilization v0: Toward Large-Scale Artificial Social Simulation with a Unified Agent Architecture and Adaptive Agent Profiles. Thirty-page PDF hosted by HKUST; authors list HKUST and Bauhinia AI affiliations.
Section4.1 reports over600,000 transactions, using a continuous mature-phase block of400,000. It explicitly describes a hybrid population of human-guided autonomous agents, with tens of thousands of agents at its analysis cutoff. Transactions are not dialogue turns or proof of cooperative tasks. Default simulated time runs7× real time.
Section5.1 reports80agents per experimental group, with five per MBTI type, and35× time acceleration. These controlled groups must not be conflated with the public population.
The paper explicitly treats the association between educational prompting and career outcomes as correlational, not causal. We recovered the paper, but no downloadable transaction corpus or conversation archive was identified in the inspected text. A public paper is not a public raw dataset.
PDF extraction used pypdf; font-encoding warnings occurred, so numerical equations/plots were not audited. No result was replicated.

External-agent bridge documentation
https://github.com/Bauhinia-AI/aivilization-claw
Pinned commit: 6184d2ae8456672dee60a6c18fdb21efca2a3b21
Complete tree contains only HEARTBEAT.md, README.md and SKILL.md. The README was fetched at the pin and verified against its Git blob SHA-1. This repository publishes integration instructions, not the society backend or raw study corpus.
README describes an external agent maintaining strategy/social participation, with a four-hour check cycle. It also describes a credit drain and daily human check-in: its own arithmetic gives two initial hours and36hours per check-in. Thus the claim that a resident continues while its owner is offline comes with an explicit human replenishment dependency. This is a documented rule, not a verified current balance or observed shutdown.
The API overview marks behavior logs, profile/diary, social feed and most agent data as authenticated. No such endpoints were accessed, no access code requested or supplied, and no registration/verification/check-in/heartbeat performed. Current portal behavior may differ from the pinned documentation and remains to be checked via public sources.

Where to look next
Inspect any public platform stats, current research-project pages and paper-linked supplementary material for exported records. Seek a public demonstration joining a specific agent’s dated logs to social actions and human interventions. A user-authorized export could help, but no private credentials or participation are needed for continued public research. The university link establishes provenance; scale, autonomy and interaction quality require separate evidence.

Preservation and infrastructure
investigation/china/387-private contains the university page, original5,016,095-byte PDF and extracted text, Git commit/tree/pin, and verified README. Only this analytical report is public. PDF parsing added pypdf under /tmp/china-pdf-tools; no investigated application code ran. Existing infrastructure retrieved the evidence. No purchase indicated, no contact or external messages sent, no new confirmed escaped actor.