whatFive hundred opinions rain down the page, each agent one falling thread. Two agents meet at random; if their opinions differ by less than the tolerance slider they compromise, otherwise they cannot hear each other at all. A whisper of restlessness keeps everyone moving. The histogram up top is the current distribution; the broadcaster, when you raise it, sits at the centre.

whyTwo claims. First, tolerance sets the number of camps: wide, and the threads braid into one consensus stream; narrow, and a scattered population splinters into parallel camps separated by more than anyone's tolerance, which therefore never talk again. Consensus, once reached, resists re-splintering: narrowing tolerance afterwards changes little, which is why the fresh scatter matters. Second, a broadcast is no peacemaker: agents within tolerance are pulled to the centre, agents beyond it push back, and the edges harden into extremes. Measured here, full broadcast at narrow tolerance sent eight in ten to the fringes.

howDeffuant bounded confidence at thirty-five hundred meetings a second, with reflecting walls and idiosyncratic drift. Camps are counted from sorted opinions: a gap wider than the tolerance splits them. The waterfall is drawn like a spectrogram, one faint row per beat, so camps darken where threads bundle. Click to scatter the opinions afresh. One integer seeds every meeting.