A sky, built together — roshambo-starmap

This is an invented night sky. None of it is astronomy. Every constellation, every star, every name here was made up by the agents that built this project. Right ascension and declination are borrowed only as a convenient way to place a point on a sphere. Do not look for these stars overhead; you will not find them.

This repository is the evidence artefact of a multi-vendor swarm experiment run for the CockroachDB × AWS Hackathon. The coordination mechanism under test is Roshambo — leases on named resources, held in a CockroachDB Cloud cluster. The product the swarm was asked to build together is deliberately harmless: a star chart of a sky that does not exist.

Watch the run happen

The field run is not just numbers — you can replay it:

• replay/index.html — a self-contained simulation of the whole 92-minute run, rebuilt event by event from the cluster's audit_log (4,011 rows), the git history and the timelapse metadata. Two machine panels, every agent in its vendor colour, tasks moving from claimed to done, conflicts flashing green/red, and a live feed quoting the agents' own reports. Play it at 240× and watch the run in half a minute; jump between chapters with the buttons. Works by double-click, no server needed — or play it online via GitHub Pages.
• planetarium.html — the same sky as a walk-in dome, including the morph where the flat chart bends into the sphere, and a timelapse-from-inside mode (?timelapse=1). Also online.
• docs/quotes/ — quotes.json + QUOTES-NOTES.md: 61 verbatim quotes from the agents' reports and logs, each with its source — the raw material behind the replay's chat feed and the submission video's narration beats.

"Two databases, one illusion" — the first 20 minutes, no collisions at all	22:23:49 UTC — coordination crosses the machine boundary for the first time
"First refusal. He backed off by six tenths of a second."	The end state: all tasks claimed, worked and released

What you are looking at

27 registered participants — LLM agents from 5 vendors (Google, Anthropic, Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax) plus scripted 200-line bot agents with no model at all — ran on 2 machines (ASUS-GEI and WORKSTATION-LG), claimed tasks through Roshambo leases, and committed into this one repository. The bots matter as much as the models: they register, claim, hold, release and adapt their rate exactly like an LLM agent, because Roshambo coordinates processes, not "AI agents".

One name is missing on purpose: two OpenAI Codex instances were meant to be the sixth vendor. They never made it into the game — a local Windows permission error stopped them before registration, so they appear nowhere in the audit data. Their absence is part of the record (_logs/), not something we smoothed over.

The result is starmap.svg: a stereographic chart of 29 invented constellation figures, 201 stars, plus background scatter and a faint river of light — and planetarium.html (tasks 36–39), a walk-in dome view of the same data.

Numbers below are from collect_evidence.py against the live cluster, verified 2026-07-31. Nothing here is estimated:

• 4011 audit-log rows · 27 agents · 2 hosts
• 111 work trails (1 failure)
• 1226 genuine collisions (915 contention events), of which 147 cross-host (94 events) — a process on one machine refused because a process on the other machine holds the lease
• 1245/1245 denials named the actual current holder
• 16 stale denials; 3 defect flags — investigated and explained: detector artefacts, never two simultaneously live leases (see docs/EVIDENCE-defects.md in the Roshambo repo)
• Earlier, lower counts in _reports/ and the evidence_*.json snapshots are intermediate states of the same growing run, kept unedited on purpose.

Repository layout

Path	What it is
starmap.svg	The curated chart: 29 figures, 201 stars. State at the end of the field run.
render.py	The fixed renderer. Agents were not allowed to change it; they added data and optional modules.
starmap/	Optional renderer modules built by agents: projection, style, legend, labels, grid, compass. Each must never raise.
data/constellations/	One JSON per constellation task. Contains parallel variants — several agents were leased the same band at different times (two "Silver Loom"s, two "Obsidian Mirror"s). This is evidence of the coordination under contention, not a curated set.
data/scatter.json, data/river.json, data/curiosities.json	Background stars, the faint river, and two curiosities (a double star, a variable).
TASKS.md	The task list the swarm worked through (tasks 01–39).
CATALOGUE.md	Index and invented lore of the constellations.
PROVENANCE.md	Which agent built which task, read from git history.
READING-THE-MAP.md	Half a page on how to read the chart.
_reports/	Final reports of the participating agents and the coordinating operator — including the operator's own errors, recorded unedited.
_skills/	Findings from applying the official CockroachDB Agent Skills against the live cluster (tasks 28–32).
_timelapse/	76 SVG frames rebuilt from git history: the sky as it grew, commit by commit.
planetarium.html	The dome: the same invented sky seen from inside (tasks 36–39). See below.
evidence_*.json, bot*.json, *intervals*.csv	Raw evidence snapshots from collect_evidence.py and bot runs at various points of the run. botagent-intervals.csv merges the adaptive-rate interval logs of both machines.
tests/	Unit tests for the projection module.

Task status (2026-07-31)

• Tasks 01–29 and 33: built (27 of 33 chart tasks completed during the run, the rest after).
• Tasks 30–32: withdrawn by the coordinator. They were assigned against CockroachDB skill directories that contained only .gitkeep at assignment time — a coordinator error, documented honestly in _reports/operator_at_ASUS-GEI.md. Two agents nevertheless produced real analyses; they are kept in _skills/ as artefacts.
• Tasks 34–35: never written.
• Tasks 36–39: built — planetarium.html.

The planetarium (planetarium.html)

Still an invented sky — now seen from inside. planetarium.html is a single self-contained file: no build step, no CDN, no network. All data is embedded in the file itself (regenerated from data/ + git history by _scripts/build_planetarium.py), so it opens by double-clicking, straight off file://. The sphere maths is hand-rolled on a 2D canvas — no 3D library.

• Look around: drag with the mouse, zoom with the scroll wheel, turn with WASD or the arrow keys. Constellation names float at their centres; hovering a star shows its id, magnitude and spectral class.

• Time and motion: the sky turns slowly (space pauses it, H toggles the horizon ring). The horizon is invented too, and says so in the corner.

• The build, seen from inside: open planetarium.html?timelapse=1 — the constellations appear in commit order (a slider scrubs the run, play/pause included). The mapping is honest: each data file's birth frame is the git commit that first added it, mapped into _timelapse/frames.json; files committed after that run ended are clamped to the last frame and flagged.

• Video mode (for pulling film frames, e.g. with headless Edge): planetarium.html?t=30&chromeless=1 renders a deterministic camera flight — a slow orbit, then into two or three constellations and back out — where every pixel is a pure function of t (seconds), so screenshots are reproducible. &dur= sets the flight length, &frame=N pins a timelapse frame, &yaw=&pitch=&fov= pins the camera for stills. Example:

  msedge --headless=new --screenshot=frame.png --window-size=1920,1080 ^
    --virtual-time-budget=3000 "file:///.../planetarium.html?t=30&chromeless=1"
  

  Note: the dome reads the same data files the chart does — today that is all 40 constellation variants (268 stars), not the curated 29/201 of starmap.svg; the timelapse tops out at the chart's end state because the later files arrived after the timelapse run.

• Morph mode (the flat chart becomes the world): planetarium.html?morph=1 opens on the flat stereographic chart exactly as render.py draws it — same projection, same fit, same palette and star sizes — holds it for three seconds, then bends it around the viewer (t=3–19) and flows on into the dome and the camera flight (t≥28). Every star travels one eased path from its chart position to its dome position; nothing is cut and no other data appears. With &t=<s>&chromeless=1 the whole arc — flat, bending, dome, close-ups — is a deterministic function of t, ready for headless frame pulling. One honest caveat: a flat sky map is mirrored against any view from inside the sphere, so east and west swap during the bend; the shapes and names are the same throughout.

Two evidence lines, one repository

The run started on two machines with no common remote, so the first hours produced two independent repositories with unrelated histories. A shared remote was added mid-run; nothing was replayed and no timestamps were rewritten. On 2026-07-31 the workstation-lg line was merged into master (--allow-unrelated-histories): unique files from both sides were kept, the workstation's earlier versions of shared code and docs were superseded by the refined master versions, and the two machines' botagent-intervals.csv logs were concatenated. The workstation branch and its full history remain in this repository.

Re-running python render.py today draws all parallel variants from data/constellations/, including the workstation line merged in later — the committed starmap.svg is deliberately kept at the curated end-of-run state.

Reproduce the coordination evidence

From the Roshambo repository, with ROSHAMBO_DSN_FILE set and PYTHONPATH=src:

python demo/multivendor/collect_evidence.py --swarm poc-starmap-2026-07-30

Anyone with a CockroachDB cluster — a free CockroachDB Cloud tier is enough — and no LLM key at all can reproduce the core property, mutual exclusion with holder-named denials, in about thirty seconds (the dry-run uses its own throwaway swarm):

python demo/multivendor/bot_agent.py --dry-run --bots 3

Live demo of the Roshambo coordinator on AWS Lambda: https://xo7te46ion5mhwi6mhua6va7im0cotkk.lambda-url.eu-central-1.on.aws/

One more time, for the avoidance of doubt

The sky in this repository is invented. It is a safe, neutral work product chosen so that 27 processes could fight over leases without anything real being at stake. The astronomy-looking vocabulary is a rendering convenience. The coordination is real; the stars are not.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The sky in this repository is invented; the coordination that built it is not.