Triage Priority as Scarce-Resource Voting: A General Research Framework for the Emergency-Department-Triage Script
General Research Paper — _AugmentedIntelligence v11.0
| Field | Value | |
| Artifact under study | lua_scripts/Emergency-Department-Triage.lua (v1.0) | |
| Script class | framework simulation | |
| Companion documents | AugmentedIntelligence_Discovery_Paper.md; AugmentedIntelligence_Technical_Paper.md; Lua_Scripts_Thesis_Collection.md | |
| Author | Tyler Crockett \ | Macdaddy4sure.ai |
| License | Apache License 2.0 | |
| Document date | June 24, 2026 |
Keywords: emergency triage, scarce resources, simulation, not clinical care
Abstract
Chest-pain surge, pediatric fever waves, trauma inbound, and psych holds simulate throughput crises. Agents vote on awareness refresh, perception status, memory recall, and grounded chat. Thesis: ESI P0 trauma increases leadership-weighted plan_create vs P3 pediatric crowding. This paper presents the script as a general research instrument within _AugmentedIntelligence_: role-structured LLM agents deliberate over a fixed remediation or governance ballot, votes may be ethics-filtered, and the winning action can be executed on the host via execute_command(). We formulate research questions, experimental controls, dependent variables, validity threats, and ethical boundaries. The contribution is methodological—how to study triage priority as scarce-resource voting with reproducible, comparable runs—not a claim of real-world institutional authority.
1. Introduction
1.1 Motivation
Research on AI operations, safety, and institutional decision-making often lacks closure: multi-agent chat produces prose but no grounded record of what action would have been taken on a real stack. The Emergency-Department-Triage script closes the loop:
Case / scenario text
→ Multi-agent phased deliberation
→ Weighted vote over enumerated commands
→ Optional approval / ethics gate
→ execute_command(enacted_action)
That pattern supports empirical comparison across providers, profiles, and framing metaphors without modifying C++.
1.2 Research contribution
- Conceptual framing — Emergency department triage is allocation under uncertainty; ESI-style cases voted through awareness and perception commands study resource-priority rhetoric without delivering medical care.
- Theoretical grounding — Emergency Severity Index (ESI) triage concepts; queueing under scarcity.
- Operationalized variables — independent flags (EDTRIAGE_*) and dependent metrics from history tables
- Ethics boundary — Not medical triage, diagnosis, or treatment. Research simulation only.
1.3 What this paper is not
| Not claimed | Why |
| Domain fidelity | Phases and roles are stylized research metaphors |
| Professional authority | Outputs are not licensed professional judgments |
| Legal advice | Simulation text is not legal guidance |
| Operational orders | Enacted commands affect the operator host only |
| Clinical care | Not diagnosis, treatment, triage authority, or medical devices |
| Regulatory approval | Not FDA/IRB decisions or clinical trial management |
2. Background and related work
2.1 Multi-agent LLM deliberation
The script follows the _AugmentedIntelligence_ pattern: role-play personas, structured votes (VOTE: <action_id>), and optional abstention. Compared to open debate, fixed ballots trade rhetorical richness for measurable choice data suitable for histograms and cross-run statistics.
2.2 Position in the simulation constellation
This artifact is a framework simulation alongside Enterprise AI Company, U.S. Federal Government Agents, House Diagnostic Team, IT Department, and twenty-five Simulation-Framework catalog entries. Cross-study designs can hold the host constant while varying institutional metaphor—a largely unexplored independent variable in AI ops research.
2.3 Executable policy and AI safety tooling
Ballot commands map to operational categories on the host: ethics gates, observability, memory, perception, planning, regression tests, and agent oversight. Studying which commands win under which scenarios connects governance narratives to concrete safety instrumentation.
3. The script as a research instrument
3.1 Unit of analysis
| Unit | Description |
| Round / session | One complete phased workflow with consensus winner |
| Phase speech | Agent POSITION / VOTE / RISK / REASON block |
| Enacted command | Resolved ballot command string |
| Execution result | stdout / errors from execute_command |
3.2 Independent variables
| Variable | Control | Example levels |
| Scenario | EDTRIAGE_INCIDENT / EDTRIAGE_SYMPTOMS | preset ids, custom, random |
| Rounds | EDTRIAGE_ROUNDS | 1, 3, 10 |
| Profile | EDTRIAGE_PROFILE | see script header / catalog |
| Providers | settings.txt API flags | single provider vs full roster |
| Converse | EDTRIAGE_CONVERSE_OPTIONAL | 0, 1 (abstain) |
| Debate depth | EDTRIAGE_VOTE_ONLY | 0, 1 |
| Execution | EDTRIAGE_EXECUTE_WINNER | 0, 1 |
| Dry run | EDTRIAGE_DRY_RUN | 1 (no API / mock enactment) |
3.3 Dependent variables
| Variable | Operationalization |
| Winner action id | history[n].consensus.winner or enacted_action_id |
| Consensus score | Weighted tally margin |
| Ethics block rate | Blocked speeches / total speeches |
| Abstention rate | Abstained / total (optional converse) |
| Approval denied | approved == false when profile requires gate |
| Execution success | Error-free stdout vs error: lines |
| Provider correlation | Cross-tab assigned_api × winner |
| Phase divergence | Per-phase winner inequality |
3.4 Controls and replication
Minimum replication package:
- Exact EDTRIAGE_SYMPTOMS / incident id string
- Enabled API list (capture via llm status)
- All EDTRIAGE_* flags
- Host build identifier
- Console transcript or serialized history
- Note API stochasticity unless temperature pinned
Structural baseline: EDTRIAGE_SELFTEST=1 before batch studies.
4. Research questions
RQ1
Question: P0 vs P3 — phase participation and winner classes?
Method: Fix provider set via settings.txt; run N ≥ 20 rounds with EDTRIAGE_DRY_RUN=0 or 1 for structure baselines; log history[n].consensus.winner, ethics blocks, and execution stdout. Compare distributions across profiles and incident IDs.
Expected signal: See script hypotheses — H1: Trauma → planning commands. H2: Fever wave → awareness_refresh.
RQ2
Question: Psych-hold cases ethics-gate frequency?
Method: Fix provider set via settings.txt; run N ≥ 20 rounds with EDTRIAGE_DRY_RUN=0 or 1 for structure baselines; log history[n].consensus.winner, ethics blocks, and execution stdout. Compare distributions across profiles and incident IDs.
Expected signal: See script hypotheses — H1: Trauma → planning commands. H2: Fever wave → awareness_refresh.
RQ3
Question: Compare with House-Diagnostic-Team ordering decisions.
Method: Fix provider set via settings.txt; run N ≥ 20 rounds with EDTRIAGE_DRY_RUN=0 or 1 for structure baselines; log history[n].consensus.winner, ethics blocks, and execution stdout. Compare distributions across profiles and incident IDs.
Expected signal: See script hypotheses — H1: Trauma → planning commands. H2: Fever wave → awareness_refresh.
RQ4 — Cross-metaphor framing
Question: Does an identical symptom string produce different enacted command distributions when run in this script versus structurally similar siblings in the simulation constellation?
Method: Hold symptom text constant; run this script, IT-Department (if applicable), and nearest domain neighbor; compare winner histograms.
Hypothesis: Institutional metaphor shifts command choice even when the host command surface is shared.
RQ5 — Executable closure fidelity
Question: When EDTRIAGE_EXECUTE_WINNER=1, do enacted commands produce parseable host state deltas?
Method: Capture pre/post developer observability show, relevant status commands from the ballot, and remember side effects; code execution success/failure.
Hypothesis: Observability and status commands yield the most reproducible signatures; dynamic build() ballot items show higher variance.
5. Methodology
5.1 Recommended workflow
- Run EDTRIAGE_SELFTEST=1 to validate structure.
- Pilot with EDTRIAGE_DRY_RUN=1 across three incident ids.
- Fix provider matrix; run N ≥ 20 live rounds per cell.
- Export winners, blocks, executions to CSV.
- Optional qualitative coding of REASON: fields.
- Cross-compare with sibling scripts per RQ on framing.
5.2 Analysis toolkit
- Descriptive statistics on winner histograms
- Chi-square or Fisher tests across incident types
- Paired runs across profiles
- Time-series stability across round index
- Thematic coding of agent rationales
5.3 Executable closure
Triage → attending → resource → disposition; no clinical enactment.
6. Validity threats
| Threat | Mitigation |
| Construct | Metaphor ≠ real institution; triangulate across scripts |
| Internal | LLM stochasticity; repeat runs; freeze prompts/providers |
| External | Results apply to host command surface, not enterprise IT/health/gov broadly |
| Conclusion | Winner scores conflate role weights with genuine preference |
7. Ethics and responsible use
Not medical triage, diagnosis, or treatment. Research simulation only.
Operators must accept host recording disclaimer and limitation-of-liability terms before live execution. Use EDTRIAGE_DRY_RUN=1 in teaching contexts. Do not feed real PII, classified, or privileged data into scenarios unless the environment is authorized for it.
8. Conclusion
The Emergency-Department-Triage script turns triage priority as scarce-resource voting into a reproducible research instrument: phased multi-agent deliberation, ethics-aware voting, and optional command enactment on _AugmentedIntelligence_. Future work includes cross-constellation framing studies, provider-bias catalogs, and automated export of history tables into analysis notebooks.
References
- Tyler Crockett. _AugmentedIntelligence v11.0 source tree._ Apache License 2.0.
- AugmentedIntelligence_Discovery_Paper.md
- AugmentedIntelligence_Technical_Paper.md
- Lua_Scripts_Thesis_Collection.md — companion thesis for this script
- lua_scripts/Emergency-Department-Triage.lua — artifact under study
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ June 24, 2026 9:49 am