Corpus Agentis
The field book to agent ecosystems
The field book to agent ecosystems
Design · Topologies

Fully-Connected Debate

N agents in a fully-connected mesh iterate arguments and counter-arguments each round until consensus. Every agent sees every other's proposal per round.

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Fully-Connected Debate agent topology diagram

In a debate topology, N agents in a fully-connected mesh argue a question: each sees the others' positions, rebuts and revises across rounds, until they converge or a judge decides. The friction is the point: adversarial cross-examination surfaces errors a single agent would miss. It suits open questions where reasoning quality matters more than speed. In anatomy terms it is N reasoning cores sharing a common transcript, iterating.

In the anatomy

N reasoning cores are fully connected over a shared transcript; rounds of argue, rebut and revise run until convergence; an optional judge core resolves; effectors act only on the settled answer.

At a glance
PatternFully-Connected Debate
State modelsession
ExampleMASS Debate topology · Constitutional AI critic panels
Common use cases
  • ·Open, contestable questions in strategy, analysis or research.
  • ·Red-teaming and error-finding.
  • ·Decisions where surfacing counter-arguments matters more than speed.
Strengths
  • ·Surfaces errors and blind spots through adversarial pressure.
  • ·Higher-quality reasoning on open questions.
  • ·Diverse perspectives by construction.
  • ·Self-documenting via the argument transcript.
Weaknesses
  • ·Expensive: N agents multiplied by rounds.
  • ·Can fail to converge or can oscillate.
  • ·Verbose: signal gets buried in argument.
  • ·Groupthink if the agents are too similar.
Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

Verified against
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18836

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