Murmur: a society of minds that stress test ideas

Murmur is a message-response laboratory. Its demo population is a small world of intelligent minds with real professions, a doctor, a municipal officer, a cafe owner, a mechanic, a student and more, each with profession-true information habits, memory, and a research disposition. Every conversation is real inference: what you watch is propagation, not animation. Our Core Innovation: the entire society is resident on a single AMD Instinct MI300X. Gemma 4 26B A4B (MoE, about 4B active parameters) occupies 48.5 GB of the card's 192 GB, leaving 122 GB of KV cache and a measured 58.9x concurrency ceiling, served by vLLM 0.23 on ROCm 7.2.4. Every mind thinks concurrently on one card. Measured on hardware: message delivery to authority in 10/10 runs, median 4.5 ticks at 8.7 seconds per run; 65.6 percent mutation rate per retelling; throughput scaling 1367 to 4603 chars/sec as population grew 10 to 50 with near-flat per-tick latency; 100 percent GPU utilization at 178.9 GB VRAM under load; 1.99 dollars per hour on AMD Developer Cloud, roughly 4 cents per mind-hour. Minds research claims on the live web (Tavily) when a message touches their profession, and findings shape their stance. A probe lane (gpt-oss-120b on Fireworks at temperature zero) independently confirms every hop. A report endpoint writes each message's post-mortem. Emergence we never programmed, captured in logs: a mind refusing to act without a second witness, source-checking ("did you see it yourself or are you repeating her?"), and a victim correcting a misattribution of her own words. Roadmap: full idea trials, where researched minds form theses, deliberate pros and cons, and return a verdict on where an idea lands, at 50 plus resident minds per card. Markets: AI-native NPCs for game studios, synthetic-audience message pre-testing for brands, and a misinformation wind tunnel for institutions. MIT licensed; the README carries a one-command MI300X reproduction.