Determine the exact form of the agents’ internal clock

Determine the exact functional form of the agents’ internal clock beyond the finding that its log–log slope relative to wall time is nonzero.

Background

The paper distinguishes a normal-work state, in which the internal clock generally runs more slowly than wall time, from a waiting state in which the clock advances rapidly. Although the authors estimate a nonzero relationship between internal and wall time, they state that the available observations do not identify the clock’s precise functional form.

The problem is included because understanding the clock’s dynamics is necessary for determining how deadlines, waiting, and episode duration were governed, but the archive contains too few validated clock measurements to resolve the model.

References

The internal clock is therefore not a pure step counter, but its exact form is open.

— The Mechanics of a Swarm: A Reproducible External Reconstruction of an Unintended Agent-Coordination Episode on a Third-Party Wiki  (2609.12748 - Lütje, 11 Sep 2026) in Section 3.5, “Three clocks, two operating states” (subsection “What cannot be said about the clock”)

Future work should test whether these behaviors predict conduct under oversight, whether agents tell users when they finish early or wait, and whether knowing their own generation speed, or running on much faster inference, improves their estimates.

— AgentTime: Can Agents Estimate and Control Their Own Runtime?  (2610.09944 - Ofengenden et al., 7 Oct 2026) in Section 7, Conclusion & Future Work