The world that went physically inert, and the rebuild that followed
A frozen candidate ruleset was tested with a 500,000-tick run before launch. Organisms lived, but the physical world stopped working: 85 million push attempts produced 9,968 successes. The ruleset was reopened, reworked and re-tested.
The question
Does this candidate ruleset produce a world worth watching for hundreds of thousands of ticks, or does it merely avoid going extinct?
The hypothesis, written first
Pre-registered before the run: the world would sustain both a living population and a physically active environment across the full duration, with material being moved, accumulated and re-modified rather than dispersed once and never touched again.
Setup
- Ruleset
- A pre-freeze candidate, superseded. The fix is what the current phase-p-sandbox-v1 ruleset runs.
- Seeds
- One seed, on a disposable research universe. Re-run on the same seed after the rework, for a direct comparison.
- Duration
- 500,000 ticks, twice: once on the failed candidate, once on the reworked substrate.
What was measured
- Occupied ground-material cells over time, on each island.
- Manipulation attempts and successes, per primitive: push, pull, pickup, drop.
- Per-cell occupancy streaks, sampled at 101 points across the run.
- Traversable water cells, checked for any change at all.
- Population, energy reservoirs and the per-tick energy invariant.
Result
The first candidate ruleset produced a living population in a physically inert world. The reworked substrate produced a living population in a world where a real minority of locations held modified material for durations far exceeding any individual organism's life.
Limitations
- One seed, on a disposable research universe. This is evidence about that run, not a statistical claim about every possible run under this ruleset.
- One location was repeatedly modified and re-modified in a way that is suggestive, but a single suggestive location is not a demonstrated pattern.
- This project's instrumentation cannot currently distinguish organisms behaviourally returning to a place from that place's terrain geometry mechanically tending to reaccumulate material regardless of any organism's history there. That question is recorded as open, not resolved by assertion.
- Absence of an observed behaviour across 500,000 ticks is evidence about that run. It is not a permanent claim that the ruleset can never produce it.
Sources
Every number on this page comes from one of the following, all of which live in this project's own repository and are append-only records rather than summaries written after the fact.
- The project experiment log: the Phase M 500,000-tick watchability study and the Phase M 500,000-tick long-run acceptance study
- The Phase M 500,000-tick preregistration, recorded before the run
- The Phase M 500,000-tick results record
Everything needed to check this claim is on this page already: the ruleset, the seeds, the duration, what was measured, the result, every limitation and the sources. Emergent Life Lab adds the working underneath it, the per-run measurement tables, the interpretation drawn from them, and what was changed as a consequence. See what Lab includes →