§ Chapter IV · Symposium Multi-agent reasoning · beta

Nine specialists, one synthesized answer.

Symposium is a multi-agent reasoning engine. Nine specialist personas argue a hard question across rounds; an adversary stress-tests every position; the process stops when the argument saturates. Every claim in the final answer is cited and checked. We use it internally to pressure-test our own research decisions.

§ IV.1 — How it works A tournament, not a chain

A tournament, not a chain.

Most multi-agent systems chain agents in series and drift toward consensus. Symposium does the opposite — specialists argue in parallel, an adversary attacks the strongest claim each round, and the answer is only declared when the debate stops producing anything new.

Round structure Saturation-terminated

IV.1

Nine personas. One adversary.

A fixed roster of nine specialist personas, plus one persistent adversary whose job is to attack the strongest position from the round before.

Each round gathers every persona's position, hands them to the adversary, and writes down what survived. That becomes the seed for the next round. The loop ends on saturation — when a round produces no new surviving claim — rather than when a token budget runs out. Every claim that reaches the final answer is traced back to its source and checked against it, so the result is auditable rather than a confident guess.

01 Specialist personas per tournament · fixed roster 9

02 Adversarial critic · persistent across rounds 1

03 Termination criterion · saturation, not budget sat.

04 Every synthesis claim · checked against a cited source cited

§ IV.2 — Use Currently · internal

What we use it for.

Symposium is in beta and used internally to harden our own research decisions. The same engine generalizes to any question that deserves more than one model's opinion.

Internal Hard research-design questions — when a multi-week experiment hinges on a methodology choice, we run it through Symposium first. The adversary catches assumptions a single model would gloss over. Methodology

Internal Literature orientation — for a new sub-field, the tournament produces a multi-perspective, cited synthesis faster than reading two dozen review papers. Research

§ A note

Part of how we work.

Symposium isn't a product we're selling or recruiting for — it's an internal tool we built to keep our own reasoning honest, still in beta. We mention it here only because it's part of what we do.