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

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.

It is impossible to enforce a world free of heuristics, but this is certainly very cool.

Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the circular QR code.

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?

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

this reminds me of Polyworld by Larry Yaeger, an artifical life sim where each creature has a vision system. i played around with this back in the early 2000s though the hardware i had access to was basically insufficient to run it in any real way. it's nice to see its development has continued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld