Public Universe 1
A living world, running right now
Emergent Life is a continuously running artificial world. Organisms move, eat, reproduce and die under a compact set of generic rules. Nobody scripts their behaviour and nobody names their outcomes in advance. Everyone who visits watches the same world, at the same moment, and it keeps running whether or not anyone is looking.
Four things worth knowing before you watch
It is one continuous world
There is one authoritative Public Universe 1. A browser is a window into it, not a copy of it. Nothing you do in the browser changes what happens inside.
Behaviour is not scripted
Organisms are controlled by small neural networks shaped by evolution and by mutation, not by hand-written rules that say what a "successful" organism should do.
The environment remembers
Organisms can move and alter material in the world, and that alteration persists after they are gone. The world carries traces of what has happened in it.
It runs without an audience
The simulation advances on a server, continuously, whether one person is watching or a thousand. Closing your browser does not pause it.
Where to go next
- Watch - open the live view straight away.
- What is Emergent Life? - a plain-English introduction.
- How it works - organisms, energy, materials, mutation.
- The science - the ideas this project draws on.
- Universe 1 - the permanent record of this particular world.