A world where every organism that can see thinks with an evolved neural brain — and half of that mind is not its own.
Nothing is taught here and nothing is trained. The weights are shaped by selection alone.
Every sighted organism carries a recurrent network: senses enter through their own weight matrix, the state vector carries between ticks, and actions are read out through a third. That state vector is split in two:
- half private — the creature's own memory, untouched by anyone else
- half shared — read from and written back into a field around it, which every nearby mind also reads and writes
Weights stay private and inherited, so two creatures touching the same substrate interpret it through different minds. Thought becomes an environment that life both senses and shapes.
Watch long enough and regions of the map drift into different collective states — cultures, with borders. Press V to see them.
Two details that make it work rather than collapse:
- Local, not global. Averaging the shared state across the whole world drowns the signal as the population grows. The field is spatial: each creature reads and writes a disc around itself, so distant regions can diverge.
- Renormalised state. A recurrent loop under unbounded mutation either saturates or fades to nothing. Normalising the state each timestep, with an inheritable gain, keeps a brain functional however far its weights drift.
There is no mover cell. Having an eye is what makes an organism mobile, so everything that moves also sees, and everything that sees thinks. The evolutionary payoff of mobility is the payoff of the brain.
This matters more than it sounds. With a separate mover cell, blind organisms walked in random directions and competed head to head with sighted ones — so an eye cost food up front while its benefit only arrived later, and thinking lineages never got off the ground. Fusing the two removes the blind random-walker from the competition entirely.
Sight still has a price: a body with an eye produces food more slowly than a blind one. Intelligence has to pay for itself.
A world lives through a long story — minds appear, predators evolve, cultures
split, populations crash, everything ends and begins again. The Chronicle
tab writes it down as it happens, names the lineages (Velnak edax, not
30jtxbo5b4), and keeps the phylogeny traceable across extinctions.
- Install node and npm
- Clone this repository and run
npm install - Run
npm run build(ornpm run build-watchwhile developing) - Serve the
distdirectory and open it in a browser:python -m http.server --directory dist
Worlds start from a single static ancestor and evolve movement and sight for themselves; on a large world that is what happens in play. "Start World with Diverse Random Crowd" instead seeds roughly one founder per 100 grid cells, so many independent lineages exist from tick one.
A grid of cells, each with a type at every tick, populated by organisms — structures made of several cells.
Cells that are not part of an organism: empty, food, and wall (blocks movement and reproduction).
Cells that only exist inside organisms:
- Mouth — eats food in adjacent cells
- Producer — randomly generates food in adjacent empty cells
- Killer — harms organisms in adjacent cells
- Armor — negates killer cells
- Eye — sees, and grants movement and thought
Organisms eat, reproduce and die; a dead body becomes food. Lifespan is the cell
count times the Lifespan Multiplier. Damage kills once it equals the cell
count, or immediately if One touch kill is on.
Once an organism has eaten as much food as it has cells (plus the cost of sight, if it has eyes), it clones itself with mutation. The child is placed far enough away that it cannot overlap its parent, plus a little variance. Reproduction fails — and wastes the food — if the target cells are occupied.
A body mutates by changing, losing or adding a cell. Gaps and disconnected cells are allowed; that is a feature. The brain mutates on the same event rather than on a 10% side-branch, so the mind is always under selection. Mutation rate is itself inherited and drifts, so lineages evolve how fast they evolve.
A child inherits its parent's body, brain and mutability, but faces a random direction. That roll is the only spatial exploration a rooted producer has, and it is what keeps a lineage from being a single orientation forever.
An eye has a direction, shown by the slit, and sees the first non-empty cell within range. Up to four eyes report at once, each contributing what it sees and how close it is, so more eyes genuinely means more perception. Alongside those the brain feels hunger, bodily integrity, age, and one channel of pure noise — a random drive evolution can wire into exploration or ignore entirely.
It answers on nine channels: four absolute headings, hold, halt, reverse, and two body turns. Turning is a decision with a cost, because an eye's direction is fixed to the body: a creature that wants to look somewhere else has to spend a move rotating, and the turn fails if the body does not fit.
Nothing rescues a creature that gets stuck. Walk into a wall and the move simply fails, with no random jolt to shake you loose — escaping is the brain's own problem, solved with memory, a reverse or a turn, and a lineage that cannot manage it dies. Movement contains no randomness at all; the dice are reserved for birth, mutation and that one sensory channel.
Issues and pull requests are welcome, including LLM-assisted ones — this project asks only that you disclose the assistance and can defend the change yourself. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the mechanics and AGENTS.md for the rules an assistant works under here.
Worlds, lineages and questions belong in Discussions; the wiki covers the brain architecture and every hyperparameter.
A fork of The Life Engine by Max Robinson. The cell-based body plan, the grid, and the idea that evolution needs no fitness function are all his. GPL-3.0, as is this.