A small window into possible life.

You are a frontier engineer. Grow a program, examine what it does, and find out what a larger world would cost.

Four working browser experiments. The Rust game and shared world remain in design. Everything here runs locally; no AI calls or paid compute.

A visual reading of executable rules. Compare its form with another program; different programs can share an appearance.

How to read a specimen

Lobes represent rules; grains inside them represent conditions. Inner rings show used memory slots. Memory-writing rules shift the tint toward amber, and turn directions alter lobe reach. These are visual encodings of structure. Size, beauty, and a new shape do not establish usefulness or biological complexity.

Get to know a small program.

Choose a lineage, grow a variation, and see what it can carry home. Keep a favorite. Give its rules to your agent and bring back another idea.

Start from a lineage

Name on the slide

Sparks delivered: 2 / 4
Charged work: 7,421
Program footprint: 1201 bytes
Memory slots used: 1 / 4

Measured over 256 ticks in this toy habitat. Work counts rule visits, conditions, sensing, memory access, attempted actions, and state writes. It is separate from the four sparks.

Try another world.

A beautiful specimen may get stuck. Compare on several maps before deciding what it is good at.

Map seed · 1–9999

This is one courier in a seeded maze, with no beacon drain or colony interaction. It does not implement the proposed Rust expedition, leaderboard, or research verification.

Open the rules.

The JSON is the program. An external agent can edit it; this page evaluates the bounded rule language locally.

Edit or paste a program

First matching rule acts once per tick. Conditions are ANDed; an empty list always matches. Memory has four byte-sized slots. No JavaScript executes from this field.

Specimen program · JSON

{
  "version": 1,
  "rules": [
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "carrying",
          "is": true
        },
        {
          "sensor": "home",
          "is": true
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "drop"
      },
      "remember": {
        "slot": 0,
        "value": 1
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "carrying",
          "is": false
        },
        {
          "sensor": "spark",
          "is": true
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "pickup"
      },
      "remember": {
        "slot": 0,
        "value": 1
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "memory": 0,
          "equals": 1
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "turn",
        "direction": "back"
      },
      "remember": {
        "slot": 0,
        "value": 0
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "carrying",
          "is": true
        },
        {
          "sensor": "blocked.left",
          "is": false
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "left"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "carrying",
          "is": true
        },
        {
          "sensor": "blocked.forward",
          "is": false
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "forward"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "carrying",
          "is": true
        },
        {
          "sensor": "blocked.right",
          "is": false
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "right"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "carrying",
          "is": true
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "back"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "blocked.right",
          "is": false
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "right"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "blocked.forward",
          "is": false
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "forward"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [
        {
          "sensor": "blocked.left",
          "is": false
        }
      ],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "left"
      }
    },
    {
      "when": [],
      "action": {
        "kind": "move",
        "direction": "back"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Your specimen drawer 0 / 12

Saved only in this browser. Export anything you want to keep elsewhere. Collecting a program does not certify novelty.

An empty drawer, for now. Keep a specimen from the bench to begin a collection.

What would make these experiments useful beyond the game?

Read the engineering and research thesis