How should a swarm coordinate?

This is a deterministic toy scheduling model, not an evaluation of real language models. Each synthetic document takes 2–6 work ticks. Classification is always correct; ambiguity and quality are outside this model.

Independent workers select randomly from unfinished documents and may overlap. A leader issues at most two assignments per tick. Shared-board agents atomically claim tasks. Failed workers stop permanently and unfinished work becomes available again.

Cost units = active worker ticks + 0.25 × coordination messages. These are simulated units, not dollars or tokens. All runs stop after 240 ticks. Seeded workloads match across strategies; there is no universally best strategy.