The Core Reasoning Pod (Triad Architecture)

In our multi-agent framework, the Core Reasoning Pod is a tightly coupled team of three specialised personas:

• Athenus — Logical Architect
  Drafts items, runs statistical models, and maintains structural validity.

• Orphea — Affective Lens
  Rewrites language for clarity, tone, and cultural resonance, ensuring questions feel human-centred.

• Skeptos — Doubt Auditor
  Injects counter-examples and flags ambiguity, forcing the other two to justify every assumption.

Why a pod of three?

• Sweet-spot for diversity vs. coordination
  Research on agentic AI shows performance rises steeply when you move from one to three agents, then plateaus while communication overhead grows quadratically. A triad captures most of the cognitive gain without drowning in chatter.
• Role separation reduces blind spots
  Each persona owns a distinct cognitive lens—logic, emotion, or scepticism. Overlapping checks catch hallucinations, biased wording, and unintended persuasion before items ever reach respondents.
• Efficient reflection loops
  A simple round-robin—Draft → Emote-Test → Doubt-Audit—converges in two or three passes, delivering clean, psychometrically sound content in minutes rather than hours.
• Scalable building block
  Triads plug into higher-level “council” loops. Need richer memory or ethics? Attach another pod without rewriting the core logic; the three-agent kernel stays intact.

Bottom line: the Core Reasoning Pod turns large-language models from solo chatbots into a disciplined team that designs, tests, and verifies assessment items with human-level nuance and machine-level speed.