Paper Detail
Igor Itkin
Simulating societies of many large language model (LLM) agents is expensive, yet the questions asked of such simulations are usually macroscopic: phase behaviour, stylised facts, and scaling with the number of agents N, not the cognition of any single agent. We turn a statistical-physics observation into a method: replace each LLM agent by a low-parameter model fitted from a few hundred to a few thousand cheap queries, then run the society at any N on a laptop. Whether this works is decided before the simulation runs, chiefly by what each agent perceives. We introduce an [interaction order x memory] taxonomy that maps perception and memory to an effective theory and a predicted N-trend of the surrogate error. We validate it on a faithful reimplementation of the LLM macroeconomy EconAgent and seven further named LLM simulations, with agent decisions cloned from genuine LLM elicitations (primarily DeepSeek) for a few dollars; the predicted error trends hold cell by cell, and the two refuted predictions, both on a strongly saturating response and traced to its curvature, are themselves matched quantitatively by the theory with no free parameters.
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@misc{itkin2026poor,
title = {Poor Man's Agentic Modeling: Simulating Large LLM-Agent Societies on a Laptop},
author = {Igor Itkin},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Simulating societies of many large language model (LLM) agents is expensive, yet the questions asked of such simulations are usually macroscopic: phase behaviour, stylised facts, and scaling with the number of agents N, not the cognition of any single agent. We turn a statistical-physics observation into a method: replace each LLM agent by a low-parameter model fitted from a few hundred to a few thousand cheap queries, then run the society at any N on a laptop. Whether this works is decided befo},
url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2608.11215},
keywords = {large language model agents, low-parameter surrogate models, statistical physics, interaction order, memory taxonomy, effective theory, N-scaling, EconAgent, DeepSeek, surrogate error, code available, huggingface daily},
eprint = {2608.11215},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}