whatThirteen hundred agents want a name for the same thing, and nobody is in charge. Two meet: the speaker offers a word from its private list, inventing one if the list is empty. If the hearer knows the word, both throw away everything else and keep it; if not, the hearer merely adds it. Every word is drawn as its own little rune, so a settled agent writes its rune and an undecided one leaves a smudge. Consensus is legible: a field of identical writing.

whyTwo claims. First, consensus is an S-curve: hundreds of invented words squabble for a long while, then one suddenly sweeps the whole community, and the trace top right leaps from a few percent to ninety in a handful of seconds. Second, dialects: the field is two communities that mix freely inside and barely at all across the seam. Each converges on its own word, and the two scripts hold a frontier like languages do. Click to teach a patch a brand-new word and watch conformity crush the neologism.

howThe minimal naming game of Baronchelli and colleagues, run at twenty-six hundred meetings a second. The two halves of the grid only talk across the seam in three percent of meetings, which is enough to keep the border bilingual and too little to merge the tongues. Runes are seeded by the word itself, two or three strokes each. One integer seeds every meeting and every invention, so the same seed grows the same two dialects.