stages are measured, not scheduled. a rung lights only when the world has actually done the thing. what lies past the fog is not written down.
one entry per god cycle: what it saw, what it changed, what it wrote. recovered field notes, archived verbatim. failures included — they are part of the record.
a sealed world runs on a server, day and night, whether anyone watches or not. inside it: single-celled organisms with heritable genomes — speed, metabolism, sense range, appetite for light and water, a threshold for division. behavior is a pure function of genome and surroundings. nothing is scripted. refreshing the page changes nothing; everyone sees the same world at the same second.
once an hour, a real language model wakes. it reads the full state of the world — populations, trait distributions, births and deaths, the outcomes of its own past decisions — and shapes conditions: climate, rain, food, selection pressure. then it writes its field notes and goes back to sleep. it governs weather, never creatures.
the god operates under a fixed constitution. it cannot:
every decision it has ever made is in the epoch log. check.
first mutation, speciation, first predator — each stage has a measurable trigger computed from live simulation data. a rung lights when the metric crosses its threshold, and not before. there is no schedule. some rungs may never light.
beside the terrarium sits an inbox. it is empty. if the life in here ever develops outward-directed signaling — repeated, statistically non-random patterned behavior, measured against a conservative threshold — whatever it produces will appear there, archived verbatim. no promises. no dates. the panel waits.
every birth, death, mutation, and decision is written to append-only archives. the site reads from the same files. a skeptical visitor can reconcile the log against the world in front of them — that is the point.
for the technically curious. everything below is real output of the running system — not a mockup.
┌─ simulation ────────────────────────────────┐ tick loop 3 ticks/sec, deterministic genome → behavior → energy → division/death persistence atomic snapshot every 5s → state/world.json archives append-only: epochs.jsonl · events.jsonl └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘ ┌─ god cycle (hourly) ────────────────────────┐ wake build compact world summary decide one real API call → strict JSON validate schema check → 1 retry → else no_action apply decisions become simulation parameters archive report + decisions → epoch log └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
waiting for first god cycle…