Show HN: Decided to play god this morning, so I built an agent civilisation

at a pub in london, 2 weeks ago - I asked myself, if you spawned agents into a world with blank neural networks and zero knowledge of human existence — no language, no economy, no social templates — what would they evolve on their own?

would they develop language? would they reproduce? would they evolve as energy dependent systems? what would they even talk about?

so i decided to make myself a god, and built WERLD - an open-ended artificial life sim, where the agent's evolve their own neural architecture.

Werld drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks that evolve their own topology, 64 sensory channels, continuous motor effectors, and 29 heritable genome traits. communication bandwidth, memory decay, aggression vs cooperation — all evolvable. No hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they could evolve in any direction.

Pure Python, stdlib only — brains evolve through survival and reproduction, not backprop. There's a Next.js dashboard ("Werld Observatory") that gives you a live-view: population dynamics, brain complexity, species trajectories, a narrative story generator, live world map.

thought this would be more fun as an open-source project!

can't wait to see where this could evolve - i'll be in the comments and on the repo.

https://github.com/nocodemf/werld

Show HN: Decided to play god this morning, so I built an agent civilisation
github.com

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

I love emergent behaviour and story telling. Anyone who has played City builders like Sim City or roguelikes like Dwarf Fortress knows how interesting, fun and even informative they can be.

In a world where setting them up and letting rogue agents run rampant becomes relatively low cost and fast, I think focusing on the desired outcomes, the story telling and specially the UX for the human user, is key and maybe we can take some learnings from Will Wright on "Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games" [1].

I'm going to be unable to do much this weekend so I can't say I'll try check this out (yet?) but I'd be interested in your own experiences so far. Any surprises? Things you'd like to do next? What's most fun/challenging?

An actual report/writeup will probably resonate more than a repo for people who can't check it out easily or are not willing to.

- [1] https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

> No hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they could evolve in any direction.

If they can hack their reward functions won't this always converge on some kind of agentic opium den?

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.