Frequently asked questions

No. There is no win condition, no score, and no designed story. It is a continuously running simulation you can watch.

Each organism's decisions come from a small neural network, so in that narrow, technical sense, yes. It is not a chatbot, an assistant, or anything that models language or holds a conversation. See how it works for the actual mechanism.

No. Nobody writes rules for what a "successful" organism should do. Behaviour comes from a neural network shaped by evolution and, within an individual's own lifetime, by limited plasticity in response to what happens to it.

No. The browser view is read-only. There is no control that reaches back into the simulation, for anyone, including the people who built this.

Yes. The simulation runs continuously on a server, whether anyone is watching or not.

Yes. There is exactly one live world at a time, and every visitor's browser is a window into that same world at the same moment, never a separate copy. That world is now Public Universe 2, founded on 6 October 2026 and running continuously since.

It is the second. Public Universe 1, founded on 21 September 2026, ran continuously for 1,467,567 ticks and was stopped on 11 October 2026, so that one machine could give its successor its full attention. It was stopped, not reset or rewritten: everything it recorded is preserved and its final figures are public. Neither world was ever patched while it ran, and the disposable staging worlds that preceded them both were retired, not promoted.

They can manipulate material and physically alter the terrain, and that alteration can persist. That is not the same claim as "building" in the sense of intentional construction, and this site does not make that stronger claim. See research notes for what has actually been observed.

Not in the unrestricted, Minecraft sense. Universe 1 gives every (x, y) world cell a bounded vertical column: immutable base geology, a conserved layer of movable substrate on top of it, and ecological cover above that. Organisms can excavate, carry and deposit units of that substrate, which is enough to raise or lower ground and move a shoreline. There is no roof, no room, no third navigable spatial axis, and no build action. See Reshaping the world for the real mechanism.

Physically, over a long enough timescale, there is currently no rule stopping near-total reclamation of shallow water - the world holds enough conserved substrate. Whether that ever actually happens, or is worth a rule of its own, is an open, unresolved calibration question Universe 1 exists to help answer. At the last measurement taken on a candidate world running these same mechanics, land area had grown only a few percent from genesis. That is real, measured terrain change, not evidence of anything resembling deliberate engineering.

Unknown. Their neural controllers evolve under selection pressure for survival and reproduction, not for any measure of intelligence, and this project makes no claim about where that process leads over a long run.

No claim is made either way. There is no evidence this project's methodology could produce that would support a claim of consciousness, so none is made.

Physically, yes: nothing prevents it. Whether they actually do, in any given run, is an open, empirical question. In every run recorded so far, including a continuous 500,000-tick study, they have never crossed and never met. See world history for the current answer in the world running now, and RN-004 for the full record.

A tracked line of descent from a founding organism. Every organism's ancestry is recorded, so it is possible to say honestly which founder population a given organism descends from, when a lineage diverged genetically far enough to count as its own, and when a lineage goes extinct. See genome, inheritance and mutation for the exact rule that decides divergence.

A tick is the simulation's smallest unit of time: every organism senses, decides and acts once per tick, and the physics (energy, movement, growth, decay) advances by exactly one step. A simulated day is a fixed number of ticks, and drives the diurnal light and temperature cycle. Ticks are not tied to real-world seconds: see the next question for why.

The live universe runs deliberately slowly in wall-clock time, at roughly one simulation tick per second, so a persistent world with changing terrain can be followed meaningfully over hours or days rather than blurring past. This is a pacing choice, not a performance limitation: it changes only the real time between ticks, never which ticks run, their order, or the physics computed on any one of them.

A staging universe is a real, persistent, continuously running world used to test a candidate physics ruleset before Public Universe 1 was founded under it. Several ran on this site, each under a different candidate, and the last of them was retired when Universe 1 was founded on 21 September 2026. None was promoted: staging worlds are disposable by design, and a world that had already been running under a candidate could not become the permanent one without carrying its own pre-genesis history into it. Since then the site has served only founded universes: Universe 1, and now Universe 2.

A second, miniature-diorama presentation of the exact same live universe Classic Watch shows - land lifted above water, forests as trees, dug and filled ground drawn as real steps. It carries no different simulation truth from Classic Watch; it is a richer way to look at the same authoritative state, particularly for seeing terrain change. The live preview is free to watch; full panning, selection and the Brain Inspector inside it are an Emergent Life Lab benefit.

No. A Lab membership unlocks presentation and analysis: richer Isometric Watch, full historical telemetry, complete lineage ancestry, a personal watchlist, saved controller comparisons and the full Research Notes archive. None of it, and no other viewer action, has any mechanism for reaching back into the simulation. Every member watches the same read-only, authoritative world everyone else does.

Two separated founder populations create a real, observable question: will they ever cross the water between them, and if they do, what happens next. It is a deliberately simple setup that produces a genuinely uncertain, checkable outcome rather than a scripted one.

The universe's history up to that point remains part of its permanent record. This project's stance on resetting a universe after extinction has not been finalised publicly; if and when it is, this answer will be updated to say so plainly.

A universe's physics are frozen for its entire life and will not be altered while it runs. Restarting the server resumes the same universe from where it left off; it does not create a new one. Public Universe 1 will never be reset for the sake of a fresh start. The staging worlds that preceded it were a different matter: they were disposable by design, and existed precisely so that the ruleset could be tested before anything permanent began.

No. A Emergent Life Lab subscription buys observation and analysis software -- a richer observer, full recorded history, ancestry tools, exports. It has no mechanism for reaching the simulation and never will: no member action can move an organism, change the physics, spawn a resource or trigger an event. The membership terms state this as a commitment, and the test suite enforces it.

Unknown, and deliberately not promised. It will run for as long as it can be kept running.

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