Act 1 · The Problem · Station 01

God Mode

Run a tiny village’s bread supply — first with every fact in front of you, then with the same task under fog. No instructions needed; the game is the argument.

Level 1 — God Mode

You can see everything.

Six workshops, each needing some bread. You have 12 loaves and every workshop tells you exactly what it needs. Place the loaves so each gets what it needs, with none wasted.

What just happened

In God Mode the task was, as Hayek puts it, “purely one of logic”: with all the relevant information in hand, matching bread to need is arithmetic. That is the world of the textbook planner — and it is the world that does not exist.

The Fog round changed nothing about the task and everything about the data. Reports arrived a week stale, two workshops were lumped into one figure, and one sent nothing at all — exactly the dispersed, incomplete, contradictory knowledge Hayek says the centre must always work from. The logic was never the bottleneck. The numbers were.

“the ‘data’ from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society ‘given’ to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given.” Hayek 1945, §I (p. 519)

This is Hayek’s knowledge problem in miniature, and it is the question the rest of the arc answers: if no single mind can ever hold the data, how does a whole economy manage to coordinate at all?