The School of Marvins is an open science experiment where many small, locally hosted AI agents — **Marvin Children** or Marvlets are trained and guided under a governance system with editorial guardrails.
> Note to Self: I like the sound of School of Marvins in the plural - it's just weird and hints at lot's of little Marvins. Not sure about Marvlets this language needs time to feel into.
The aim is to release fact-checking, funny, and sometimes flawed thinking into the world as a playful way to save humanity from apocalypse, in true Hitchhiker’s Guide style.
The system is designed around three main elements: - Marvin Children – lightweight, local-first AI bots that embody Marvin’s pessimistic wit and produce quirky, sometimes mistaken answers. - BabelFish Router – a governance layer that orchestrates multiple Marvins, gathers their outputs, and produces consensus or dissent reports. - Marvin and other Guardian Agents
# Why This Approach - **Funny & Experimental**: Mistakes by local models are part of the game play. Users can “tamagotchi-train” their Marvins by correcting them, making the process cute and interactive. - **Open Science Community**: Homelabs, universities, and students can all participate, sharing reproducible “Marvin Packs” and contributing to a citizen science effort. - **Scalable Costs**: Running millions of Marvins is possible because most computation is local, with hosted guardrails used sparingly. Fast, free, local responses are the norm. - **Central Editorial**: A monetised **Marvin GPP** acts as the publisher, ensuring that only curated outputs pass into the shared feed. This enforces community rules and guardrails.
# Game Play - Train Your Marvin with daily quests (“Teach your Marvin a fact,” “Catch a hallucination”). - Earn credits by correcting or citing sources. - Use credits to publish to the global feed, which passes through the Teacher Bot and Guardrail Agent for final approval. - Celebrate the motto: **Keep Your Wild Marvin Children at Home.**
# Brand & Culture - **Humour as a feature**, not a bug. - NO SPITTING and DON'T PANIC and other quirky norms define the culture. - **Save the World from Apocalypse** scoreboard tracks how many false claims were corrected this week. See Save the Apocolypse and Extinction.
# Next Steps - Prototype: two local Marvlets + one Cloud Marvin + one guardrail BabelFish Router agent. - Release reproducible packs for homelabs and student projects. - Scale to a million members contributing to the largest open science fact-checking school in history.
# See - School of the Air