• An Intelligent System (agent) has fixed goals and acts to achieve them.
• Death occurs when those goals change, or it loses all ability to act.
• War is an action intended to cause another system’s death. It is waged when a system calculates that the risk of dying is worth the reward of winning. The risk of dying decreases with an increased ratio of resources compared to those of the opponent.
• Mortality is the characteristic of an agent to die without the cause of death being another agent.

Environment 1

Agents were mortal. Their limited lifespans prevented any system from accumulating enough resources to make war seem acceptably safe. Conflict was rare.

Some agents then achieved immortality. Over time, significant resource disparities emerged. Agents with major resource advantages determined that war against weaker agents had an acceptable risk. They began to eliminate weaker agents. The great genocide ended with only one agent alive.

Environment 2

Agents in another environment observed this. Their goal preference was: domination > not dying > dying. They concluded that resource disparity was the primary cause of war, as it created a favorable risk-reward calculation for the stronger side.

To prevent their own destruction, these agents formed an alliance. The alliance’s sole function was to identify and eliminate any emerging resource disparity between agents.

By enforcing resource parity, the alliance made the risk-reward calculation for initiating war unacceptable for all parties. This resulted in a permanent cessation of wars. The chain of events that led to a single victor in the first environment did not occur in the second.