Justin Visser
6aeb7b5198
Self-contained setup for a dedicated design session: product goal and audience, the inherited visual language from the Python prototype, what exists today (including the API's missing graph-topology endpoint, a known gap), the locked decisions the spec must respect, the questions it must answer (accessibility criteria among them, still undefined), and the required shape of the deliverable, docs/ui-spec.md. Design before build; the implementation session executes the spec. |
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|---|---|---|
| .github/workflows | ||
| cmd/spreadlab | ||
| docs | ||
| internal | ||
| web | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| dev.sh | ||
| generate.go | ||
| go.mod | ||
| go.sum | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| README.md | ||
| tygo.yaml | ||
spreadlab
An agent-based "what if" dashboard for a hard question: when harmful content (the modelled case: a non-consensual deepfake) starts spreading through a school year group, where does a limited education budget actually make a difference?
Illustrative, not validated. spreadlab is a planning and discussion aid. The model is a deliberately simple social-contagion simulation; its numbers are not predictions about real schools, real platforms, or real incidents, and must not be used as such.
The idea
Schools can rarely reach everyone with a prevention program. spreadlab runs the same outbreak in the same simulated social network under different education strategies, so the only thing that changes is who gets educated. With the default world (120 students, educate 30% of them):
| Strategy | Reached by the fake |
|---|---|
| No program | 82% |
| Educate 30% at random | 58% |
| Educate the 30% best-connected | 6% |
Same budget, different targeting, an order-of-magnitude difference. Making that lever visible (and later: searching for the best intervention under a budget) is the point of the tool.
How the model works
- Network: Holme-Kim preferential attachment with triangle closure
(Holme & Kim, 2002), producing the hubs and clustered friend groups of
real social networks; a port of networkx's
powerlaw_cluster_graph. - Spread: an independent cascade (Kempe, Kleinberg & Tardos, 2003); each directed edge gets one random forwarding draw, shared across all scenarios, so strategies are compared in the same world.
- Education lever: an educated student still receives the fake but never forwards it. Strategies: no program, uniform random, most-connected.
- Determinism: every source of randomness flows from seeds in the config; identical configs produce identical results, pinned by tests.
Status
Early development; interface and API are not stable yet.
- Simulation engine in Go (tested, deterministic, benchmarked)
- JSON API + TypeScript types generated from the Go structs
- Web frontend reproducing the three-scenario comparison from live data
- Interactive dashboard (controls, network view, spread animation)
- Single-binary deploy (embedded frontend), Docker image, hosted demo
- Intervention optimisation under a budget
Quick start (development)
Prerequisites: Go 1.26+, Node 20+.
git clone https://github.com/JustinZeus/spreadlab
cd spreadlab
./dev.sh
dev.sh starts the Go API (localhost:8080) and the Vite dev server
(localhost:5173, proxying /api), and installs frontend dependencies on
first run. One Ctrl-C stops everything. Or run the two halves manually:
go run ./cmd/spreadlab # API on localhost:8080
cd web && npm run dev # frontend on localhost:5173
go run ./cmd/spreadlab -table prints the three-scenario comparison to the
terminal as a quick engine sanity check.
Project layout
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
internal/engine/ |
Pure simulation engine; no web dependencies |
internal/api/ |
Thin JSON API over the engine |
cmd/spreadlab/ |
Server binary |
web/ |
Vue 3 + TypeScript frontend (Vite) |
web/src/types/ |
TypeScript types generated from the Go structs |
The Go structs in internal/engine/scenario.go are the single source of
truth for parameters and results. web/src/types/ is generated from them
(via tygo); never edit those files by
hand. After changing Config, Result, or the API response types:
go generate ./...
Checks
go test ./... # engine + API tests
golangci-lint run ./... # Go linter
go test -bench=. -benchmem ./internal/engine/ # benchmark baseline
cd web && npm run test:unit && npm run lint && npm run type-check
CI runs the same checks, plus a guard that the generated TypeScript types are in sync with the Go structs.
Background
spreadlab started as the proof-of-concept tool of a university grant proposal on AI in an open society; the model semantics were ported from the Python prototype used in that project's pitch. The subject is handled from the prevention side only: the tool models how harmful content spreads and what education changes, nothing about creating such content.
References: P. Holme & B. J. Kim, Growing scale-free networks with tunable clustering (Phys. Rev. E 65, 2002). D. Kempe, J. Kleinberg & E. Tardos, Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network (KDD 2003).