completely fair, and thanks for the nudge - expect an updated readme shortly

got the updated version up and again, appreciate the nudge there!

And stupid leading emojis for the heading.

Appreciate this! and yeah the will wright talk is exactly what I was leaning into.

Actually posted this on X 2 weeks ago, hosted the werld observatory public, and had gemini stream a new chapter of the story in natural language every 10,000 ticks - so it felt like reading through a david attenburgh novel of werld being born.

Most interesting thing from the last run was definitely the language and the behaviours, they decoding what they were actually saying was a difficult one, and noticing them group within their diverged species.

Up next, i want to get the storytelling side up and running too - kept running out of storage, and cloudflare playing up as usual - maybe get gemini to visualise each chapter - and get an upgraded interface for the werld observatory.

If you want to check out my previous attempt at streaming the story line - it's still on my X - https://x.com/im_urav?s=21&t=6Si-w-DvNJC7RfvSz2Aw-w

Love the MIT AI Koans. Minsky's actual words to Sussman were "well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." And he's right, the room isn't empty.

Werld's room has walls. The graph topology, energy mechanics, metabolic costs, seasons, those are all design choices. But those are the physics, not the behavior. I chose the laws of nature, not what agents do with them.

Whether they cooperate or attack, broadcast or stay silent, grow complex brains or prune them down, that's selection, not me.

The agents also aren't randomly wired like Sussman's net — they start with minimal NEAT networks and evolve structure through survival. So the preconceptions are there, I just tried to make them physics rather than policy.

Curious how you would approach removing those from an artificial sim like this?

that would be true if there was a reward function. compute_reward() exists in the code, but it returns 0.0.

they're only living/evolving to survive, and fork (reproduce).

can't wirehead natural selection if the brain does nothing useful, they'd die and their genome would die with them.

I take that back, I was falling asleep and then suddently had a population spike. Very good!

should be starting with 30... if you're seeing 2 that might be an older default that I tried out (an adam and eve experiment). You can change it in the config too.

On the dying immediately thing - offspring get a fraction of the parent's energy when they fork. If the parent forks too early (low energy), the kid spawns with barely anything and can't cover its tick cost + brain metabolic cost.

That's working as intended — reproducing too early is a bad strategy and selection should punish it. But if everything dies instantly, something else might be off.

completely agree on the heuristics (someone else mentioned the MIT Koan comment about this). And yeah Plaything is a little too close to home... no QR codes from werld agents yet though. Will keep you posted.

hopefully it stays that way.... although I did start setting up a rig to host them on.

Haven't come across Polyworld before — just looked it up and its super cool, especially for 1994. The vision system is a interesting design choice. Werld takes a different approach — graph topology instead of a 2D plane, and NEAT brains instead of Hebbian learning — but the core philosophy is the same.

And yeah hardware has caught up a bit since the early 2000s, though my hard drive is having a hard time. Thanks for the reference, going to dig into Yaeger's papers.

wonder if the black mirror episode was based on polyworld then?

This actually showed up in the first run, agents that invest more energy into offspring vs ones that fork cheap and fast.

the ones that survived population crashes were the ones passing down leaner, better-inherited brains. Cheap forking works when there's plenty of energy around, falls apart in famine.

Thanks! The story generator is pretty simple right now — every 10,000 ticks the sim snapshots population stats, brain complexity, species changes, births/deaths, communication activity and runs it through a template that writes a plain-english chapter.

Building out a more engaging version, and will hopefully stream it onto X again as a story - but this time without chewing api tokens every couple of seconds.

NEAT for trading is interesting - on BTC i used a kernels method that worked quite well and closer to that <2 sharpe on a monthly.