Kurt Seiffert

Independent researcher — Bloomington, Indiana.

I study AI agents and world models — what it takes for a machine to understand its situation rather than pattern-match its way through it.

What I'm working on

MCP GRID — Mortality Control Protocol on the Game Grid. An experiment in grounded AI cognition: an LLM agent plays the roguelike ANGBAND under a harness that makes its situation real — mortal, resource-bound, with affective state mediating between perception and action. Characters die; their descendants inherit only what their ancestors left behind as written artifacts. I want to know whether that loop produces something we'd call a world model — or whether it produces optimization without understanding.

Status: harness and instrument design; preregistration planned. Project page →