A character sheet, in plain words
Each twin is built from public population records of its place and carries a short sheet written in plain words: a name and age, a background, a neighbourhood, a line of work, a household — married or not, whether it owns or rents its home, its schooling and its religious practice — a political outlook, and a line about daily life.
Each detail is drawn on its own seeded stream, so the same place and the same settings build the same twins every time, and adding a detail never reshuffles the others.
The brief, in a fixed order
The model reads the same sections in the same order for every reading. First the date the reading is set at, with the instruction that nothing after that date has happened yet. Then the question, and any background you gave, stated neutrally. For a pick among options, the choices follow, spelled exactly as you wrote them and in the order you wrote them.
Next comes recent news, if the reading has any; then any what-if event you added, which every twin on the panel is told it has heard; then an image, if one rides along. Last comes the panel itself — one character sheet per cell, each under an id its answer must carry back.
Because every section is written from ordered inputs, the same population and the same question produce the same brief, word for word.
What the news is, and when there is none
For a current reading, the twins see recent headlines about their place, with the instruction that nobody follows all of it and each twin should weigh an item the way that particular person plausibly would. Headlines are cut at the reading’s date. A reading set far enough in the past sees no news at all, and neither does a backtest, so a past outcome is not handed to the twins in the brief.
How the answer comes back
For a yes/no question the model gives, for each twin, the chance that that person says yes. For options it spreads chance across the choices according to how likely that person is to pick each one. For a belief question it gives the chance the outcome happens, priced the way that person would price it. Each answer carries a short reason.
Answers are matched to twins by the id they carry back, never by their position in the reply, and a reply that names a twin who is not on the panel is refused whole rather than guessed at.
What it does not read
The brief holds nothing else: no other twin’s answer, no earlier reading, nothing you did not put in the question. A real business can appear as a fact about a place; a real business name is never given an opinion.