From Sand to Superintelligence · Drill cards · Chapter 35
Drills
Swarm
10 atomic recall cards. Export to Anki and let spaced repetition do its slow work.
In Anki: File → Import, choose this TSV, set field separator to Tab, deck = Sand to Silicon · Ch 35, note type = Basic.
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| How many agents does a typical production multi-agent system contain? | 3–7 agents. |
| What is the token-cost multiplier of a three-agent debate versus the best single agent on the same task? | ~5× more tokens. |
| What accuracy lift does debate typically produce on hard tasks? | ~10–25% over the best single agent. |
| Name the three walls that single-agent systems hit, as listed in the chapter. | Context length, specialization, and error correction. |
| What is the 'collusion' failure mode of the debate pattern? | Two instances of the same model will often agree on the same wrong answer, especially when the model is overconfident — they fail to genuinely challenge each other. |
| How many pairwise interfaces does a five-agent system have? | Ten — C(5,2) = 10. |
| What does the chapter say is the most under-discussed cost of multi-agent systems? | Debugging: tracing a failure across ten pairwise interfaces is harder by an order of magnitude than debugging a single agent. |
| What communication pattern does the chapter say rarely survives in production? | Plain text turns in a shared transcript — a research convenience that becomes wasteful and impractical past three or four agents. |
| What three things does the chapter say multi-agent systems actually buy you? | Specialization, error correction, and context isolation. |
| In what domains does the chapter say the debate pattern's accuracy lift is typically worth the 5× cost? | High-stakes settings: legal review, medical synthesis, financial decision support. |