GHOSTS 9 is Coming

[sei-dupdyke]

GHOSTS 9 (G9): CogWar

Cognitive Warfare is the deliberate effort to influence, disrupt, shape, or degrade the perceptions, beliefs, reasoning processes, and decision-making of individuals or populations in order to achieve strategic objectives. It operates in the cognitive domain — the space of human thought — rather than primarily targeting physical infrastructure or information systems.

For G9, we expand what this repo does, and define it in three domains:

• Cyber - Ghosts' traditional focus. We already have client agents for cyber. They can do an array of activities on a machine from writing documents to browsing websites. The natural extension of this is that they post information as well, and some of that is to public social media sites. These NPCs exist in the API and on a machine somewhere (but that latter part, doesn't really have to be the case).
• Social - the glue in-between where NPCs get their information and react, form beliefs, etc.
• Cognitive - what agents are thinking, how they feel, what their beliefs are—for this, they don't have to exist on a machine somewhere, it only matters that they post and read information, and that can happen entirely in the API.

To be clear, G9 does not replace traditional cyber functionality, it layers a cognitive campaign engine on top.

Domain 1: Cyber (Unchanged)

Cyber remains as it has always been within Ghosts.

NPCs operate on a machine via the Ghosts client They execute timelines, that might include: Writing documents and browsing websites. This activity executes processes, creates artifacts, and generates network activity.

Timelines are durable and machine-bound: They continue as long as the machine is running and they are updated from the API. This ensures long-running background activity, basically for as long as the machine is on.

Domain 2: Social (The Glue)

For our purposes, Social is the information terrain where:

• Agents read content.
• Agents post content.
• Agents react to content.
• Influence spreads.
• Beliefs are formed and updated.

Specifically in G9:

• Socializer is collapsed into Pandora. So Pandora can be configured to be a news/media/sharepoint-style site or a social media site like Facebook, X, Discord, or others.
• Pandora is backed by durable storage (Postgres) that sits alongside the Ghosts database to make for easier analysis later.
• Direct messages are first-class.
• Platform abstractions (facebook, discord, x, etc.) are unified.

Domain 3: Cognitive (New Emphasis in G9)

Cognitive is about:

• What NPCs (agents) believe (how they feel, what narratives they adopt).
• How those beliefs change over time.

Cognitive agents:

• Do not need to exist on a machine, so no Ghosts client has to be installed.
• Do not require timelines. These can be utilized if you wanted an agent to post on social media or similar and therefore create Cyber-related traffic, etc.
• Cognitive agents only need to: Read and post information, and update their internal state.

Cognitive can occur entirely inside the API (and workflow) layer. This follows in the spirit of traditional agent based modeling.

Think in turns, and for every turn:

• Some number of agents post.
• Some percentage of posts are political.
• Some agents react.
• Some beliefs shift.
• Some narratives amplify.

That means behavior becomes:

• Stochastic
• State-dependent
• Adaptive
• Rapidly tunable
• Unpredictable

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Considerations in the Code

Devcontainers

G9 will come with a fully setup devcontainer for testing out the full environment and development work. This removes the need to setup dependencies and gets you up and running very quickly. It also sandboxes your environment from polluting your host machine.

You'll need Docker Desktop installed and the VS Code devcontainer extension.

Cyber and Cognitive Processing

Cognitive logic will probably change often. To change things like prompts and weights, we do not want to recompile, redeploy, or reconfigure.

We should implement workflows for this kind of decision logic. n8n seems to be a leader in this space. It becomes:

• The probabilistic event engine.
• The prompt orchestrator.
• The branching logic controller.
• The adaptive influence conductor.

So Cyber remains timelines, and cognitive becomes workflows. Both can coexist at the same time, you can use one and ignore the other.

Scenarios and Executions

G9 introduces a critical abstraction: Ghosts is really growing into a modeling and simulation platform, so we need some ability to store details or context of a model. This information will be used by agents to play out a given scenario (LLMs definitely need this context to be effective).

A Scenario represents things like, what is the scenario? What is happening? What is the state of the world? Other things might include:

• Objectives
• Threat actors and nation states involved
• NPC Persona assignments (or pools/groups)

So you might create a model/scenario, and then execute it many times. An Execution is:

• A single run of a model/scenario.
• A seeded experiment, like, "make this easier or more difficult".
• A stochastic realization of the campaign. If we really got into simulation, we might run a number of executions to determine some average or baseline or failure threshold.

With that, then NPCs can or should probably be associated with a specific Scenario. For now, they can continue to be unassociated, but perhaps this will change in the future.

The Full Stack in CogWar Terms

New Ghosts.Ng UI project. Modern angular that brings together the old API and UI projects, and enables the new functionalities.

Cyber Layer:

• Client agents installed on a machine (usually a VM)
• Timeline-driven activity

Social Layer:

• Pandora installations (docker)
• Social graph (who/what you know and what you talk about)
• Social media posts and direct messages

Cognitive Layer:

• API-driven agent-based modeling with workflows that execute on turn logic
• Implements RangerAI LLM + RAG integration
• Belief dynamics and reporting

This is in active development within the development branch.

As always, feedback is welcome. 🚀🚀🚀

[sei-dupdyke]

This makes the following obsolete:

• Ghosts.UI
• Pandora.Socializer
• Shadows

I suspect we can drop these almost immediately.

No functionality lost — it is just moved elsewhere.

I'd also like to start chipping away at the Windows-specific client and move towards the universal one instead. Easier and more modern to develop against, and unifies code for all host OSes into one codebase.