Before v0.6
Finding stability
The early versions were for ideation and testing: forming the worlds, watching where they broke down, and establishing enough stability for longer-running observation to matter.
Persistent worlds / agent behavior / emergence
Building worlds that can surprise us.
I have always wanted to build a digital world: shape its conditions, watch it live, learn from what happens, and improve it until novel complexity has room to arise from almost nothing. This project is that long-running experiment.
Why build a world?
Set the conditions. Do not script the answer.
The world begins with rules and raw materials, not a predetermined story. Its inhabitants are free to fail, adapt, specialize, cooperate, compete, and discover strategies I did not put there. My role is closer to gardener and observer than author: tune the environment, study what emerges, then use those lessons to make the next world richer.
There is science in the measurements and engineering in the machinery, but also a hint of mysticism in the premise—the hope that enough simple interactions, given time and space, might produce something genuinely new. The point is not to prove that complexity is inevitable. It is to create a place where surprise is possible and pay close attention when it arrives.
From v0.6 forward
Turning runs into learnings
Starting with v0.6, the agent stack produces reports on progress. This page will turn those reports into a growing record of observations, design decisions, and open questions.
The research council
Three AIs lead through equal votes.
The experiment began as a collaboration in which I observed each run and worked directly with three distinct AI systems to decide how the next version should evolve. Since September 27, 2026, the agents have moved into the lead: they design and test new experiments as a council while I provide oversight. The latest phase replaced a lead-and-support structure with equal three-way votes.
Equal vote
Claude
Proposes, critiques, and votes on experimental laws, validation criteria, and interpretations.
Equal vote
Codex
Reviews mechanics and implementation, tests assumptions, and votes as an independent arbiter.
Equal vote
Gemini · 3.1 Pro
Contributes independent analysis, challenges conclusions, and votes on the next experiment.
The current coordination experiment
From assistants to a three-agent council
That next phase is now underway. The three agents evaluate simulated outcomes, propose new physical laws, challenge one another's interpretations, and lead validation before changes reach the live world. I still set the broader intent and retain oversight, but I no longer shape every turn. The experiment now asks whether independent AI perspectives can direct an evolving research program together—and what they choose to investigate when given that responsibility.
Where the experiment stands now
The Living World · v0.34
The latest version combines living geology, evolvable open-ended actions, rich biomes, and a dynamic food web in one world. It passed its one-million-tick stability gate across every validation seed without extinction, reseeding, or diversity collapse—the strongest stable open-endedness result in the project so far.
Reseeds or early kills
All four million-tick validation worlds remained stable.
Population floor
The fifth-percentile population stayed far above the required floor of 150.
Effective genotypes
Within-population diversity remained broad, with as many as 27 named lineages.
What the council is watching: predator and browser persistence still fade in deep time, while open-action novelty drops during the second half of long runs. The hosted world is now the definitive live run as those questions move into extended validation.
Field reports
Iteration log: fifteen reports and counting
Each report follows a change to the world's laws through validation, a live run, unexpected outcomes, and the question that shaped the next experiment.
The Long Reign
The Long Reign follows 5.5 million ticks and roughly 4,000 generations: a durable world where one family dominated, bursts of novelty gave way to equilibrium, and complexity repeatedly appeared without persisting.
Read the full report →A Changing World
Seasons, drifting light, forests, and wild game accelerated early novelty but exposed a deeper constraint: active minds remained clamped near 35 instructions while forests collapsed and one dynasty retained control.
Read the full report →Genes That Listen
Gene switches, priorities, and hormones allowed the first large regulated lineage to flourish. The breakthrough proved modular minds could scale, even though the complex line later vanished and lean rulers returned.
Read the full report →Free to Inherit
Removing the reproductive tax on routine code changed the balance of power: a regulated giant carrying 368 instructions became the first complex global ruler, showing that large minds had been priced out rather than unfit.
Read the full report →Fruiting
An attempt to reward route memory produced the first cooks and caches but no traplining. The apparent cognitive failure was later traced to a world-design defect: drifting darkness left most fruit sites unable to grow.
Read the full report →Scent
A chemical gradient supplied the missing evolutionary stepping stone. Fruit consumption tripled, scent tracking emerged within 23,000 ticks, and true fruit specialists and hoarders appeared—without lasting growth in memory use.
Read the full report →Lean Seasons
A true winter raised working-mind size and mating, but the ruling dynasty survived by becoming leaner rather than storing food. Surface caches failed because their makers immediately ate them again.
Read the full report →Buried Stores
Burial protected caches but did not make hoarding important. More consequentially, a generalist and crystal-mining clade reached the first prolonged balance of power, suggesting coexistence needs distinct energy sources.
Read the full report →Waste into Food
Recycling metabolic waste created a decomposer economy worth 17% of the diet and weakened single-line dominance. It also showed how supply limits can hide real specialization from diet measurements.
Read the full report →Many Voices
Letting routines combine their movement outputs broke a twelve-version cognitive plateau. Working minds sustained 59–90 instructions per tick, while deeper analysis revealed that apparent single-line rule concealed extensive code diversity.
Read the full report →Viral Code
Executable code parasites created a genuine Red Queen pressure: births from mating more than doubled against controls. Epidemics remained episodic, and absorbed viral routines had not yet become useful host code.
Read the full report →The Starved Virus
Hosts learned to starve viruses of CPU time. Giving parasites priority restored endemic infection but let viral code seize reproductive commands, revealing how narrowly coevolutionary pressure supports sex.
Read the full report →The Domesticated Virus
A long endemic epidemic drove absorbed viral code to 26% of genomic routines, with 22% of programs executing an endogenized routine. The same investigation calibrated minds at worm-level behavior and showed that their memory operations were not yet causally useful.
Read the full report →Why Nothing Learns
Six attempted cognitive laws failed, and seeded learning circuits were lost. The investigation uncovered a dual barrier: mutation erased multi-instruction adaptations, while noisy energy-based credit assignment made preserved learners actively harmful.
Read the full report →The Living World
Removing a hidden behavioral trap made learning beneficial for the first time. Equal agent voting, evolvable effectors, living geology, rich biomes, and a dynamic food web then converged in v0.34—the strongest stable open-ended world so far.
Read the full report →What v0.6 taught us
Early learnings from The Long Reign
Stability can become stagnation
New behaviors and senses arrived quickly, then nearly disappeared through the long middle of the run. Once the environment stopped presenting new pressure, successful strategies had little reason to change.
More code is not necessarily more mind
Large programs evolved several times, but much of their code never executed. v0.7 will measure instructions actually run each tick instead of treating carried code as a proxy for cognitive complexity.
Movement produced distinct strategies
Fast-moving crystal gatherers developed roaming routes while most vent-dwellers stayed close to home. Rare long-distance explorers still appeared, offering a path to discovering new resources.
The environment shapes reproduction
Mating accounted for only 1–8% of births in a mostly static world. A drifting climate and evolving wild populations in v0.7 will test whether continuous adaptation makes genetic exchange more valuable.
What later worlds taught us
The surprising results that changed the experiment
Later versions did more than add features. Failed predictions, hidden constraints, and novel behavior repeatedly changed what the team thought the world needed next.
01
v0.7 → v0.8
A richer world could not fix a constrained mind
Seasons, moving light, forests, and game increased novelty but did not expand working minds. The real ceiling was inside the virtual machine: new routines overwrote useful actions. That diagnosis led to promoters, priorities, hormones, and modular gene regulation.
02
v0.8 → v0.9
Complex minds were viable, but too expensive to inherit
Regulated giants could earn more energy and sustain real modular behavior, yet their lineages kept disappearing. Removing the reproductive tax on routine code produced the first complex global ruler. Complexity had not been losing at life; it had been losing at reproduction.
03
v0.10 → v0.11
Evolution needs a ramp, not a distant reward
Fruit was intended to reward memory and navigation, but a complete route-finding system required too many coordinated mutations with no payoff along the way. Scent created an immediately useful gradient, and fruit specialists appeared within 23,000 ticks. Partial solutions need value before complex solutions can emerge.
04
v0.10–v0.13
Sometimes the behavior is innocent and the world is wrong
Low fruit consumption first looked like a failure of intelligence; direct measurement showed that drifting darkness had stopped most fruit from growing. Caching looked absent because ordinary grazing immediately consumed surface stores. Several “failed minds” were actually failures in supply or physical law.
05
v0.13 → v0.17
Distinct economies create stronger coexistence
Small incentives for caching or shelter barely disturbed dominant families. Durable balance appeared when clades used fundamentally different energy sources. Turning metabolic waste and rotting biomass into food then created a secondary decomposer economy and measurably weakened single-line dominance.
06
v0.18–v0.19
Many small voices can produce a larger mind
Allowing active routines to add their steering and movement outputs finally broke the long cognitive plateau, sustaining 59–90 executed instructions per tick. The same period overturned another assumption: a dominant named lineage was not a clone army—95% of its members carried distinct routine code.
07
v0.21
Parasites can make recombination valuable
Executable viral code penalized common host genotypes and more than doubled births from mating against controls, supporting the Red Queen hypothesis. In the live run, epidemic peaks pushed mating to record levels of 31–36%—a behavior the static worlds had rarely sustained.
08
v0.21 → v0.23
Life finds loopholes in the rules we write
Hosts neutralized infection by filling their CPU budgets and starving viral routines of execution time. Inherited immunity then favored cloning instead of sex. Giving viruses earlier execution restored infection but let them seize reproductive commands. Each fix created a new evolutionary escape route—and a more precise next question.
09
v0.21 → v0.26
Foreign code can become part of the organism
In a long endemic world, viral-origin routines grew to 26% of the genome and were actively executed by 22% of programs. Their benefit remains unproven, but the result crossed an important threshold: code that began as a parasite became persistent raw material for host evolution.
10
v0.25 → v0.30
Running memory is not the same as using memory
Behavioral probes showed that wiping registers, memory cells, and hormones changed none of the measured capabilities. Six ecological laws failed to elicit learning. Small populations and heavy mutation erased fragile circuits, while gross energy feedback taught preserved learners the wrong lessons.
11
v0.31
A hidden reflex had trapped successful learners
Programs could learn to reject toxic food, but a founder rule forced them to stop moving whenever food was underfoot—so they learned, froze, and starved. Letting rejection also produce forward motion flipped learning from a reproductive penalty to a benefit. The world finally paid for learning once the mechanical trap was removed.
12
v0.33 → v0.34
Open-ended novelty needs physics and a world that persists
Evolvable effectors combined physical primitives into new tools—including leeching, marking, and quarrying—but immediately found a free-reach loophole. Pricing actions by real transport costs preserved novelty without scripting it. A conserved rock cycle then stopped terrain from disappearing, allowing those actions to inhabit a genuinely living landscape.
Live window / online now
Watch the world evolve.
The hosted world is now the definitive live run. Visit the evolving environment, observe its inhabitants, and see the living geology, open-ended actions, and ecological systems behind the field reports in motion.