Two islands, zero crossings, so far
Two founder populations were placed on separate landmasses with water between them. In every run to date, including a 500,000-tick study, they have never crossed and never met. The staging world that preceded Universe 1 visibly reshaped its own ground -- land area up 8.75% from its genesis -- while the strait between its islands stayed 43 cells of open water at the narrowest, with no crossing. Public Universe 1, founded 21 September 2026, inherited the question and has not answered it either: the two populations have still never met.
The question
Will two populations, founded separately on two landmasses with no bridge between them, ever come into contact?
Setup
- Ruleset
- Historical runs (below) under phase-p-sandbox-v1 and its predecessors; the staging world that preceded Universe 1 under phase-z-voxel-substrate-v2. Universe 1 itself runs pre-genesis-candidate-v2.
- Seeds
- Multiple exploratory runs across Phases H, I, J and M; the staging candidate staging-20260906-phase-z2, retired when Universe 1 was founded.
- Duration
- Up to 500,000 ticks in the longest historical study; 161,000 ticks on the staging world before it was retired. The question continues in Universe 1, whose current tick is reported live on the Universe 1 page.
What was measured
- Each organism carries the island its founding ancestor came from, west or east, as a permanent inherited marker. A crossing is the direct check that an organism's inherited origin differs from the island it is currently standing on.
- Contact is the separate question of whether an organism descended from one island has ever physically encountered one descended from the other.
- On the staging world that preceded Universe 1: net land-area change from its genesis, and the narrowest and median width, in cells, of open water still separating the two islands' current coastlines, read directly from the same authoritative terrain the simulation runs on.
Result
No crossing and no contact has been observed in any run to date, including a continuous 500,000-tick historical study, and the staging world that preceded Universe 1 at 161,000 ticks and 8.75% land growth from genesis.
Limitations
- The runs performed are not an exhaustive sample of the possible worlds this ruleset can generate.
- A crossing would require material accumulation in a specific place and an organism to walk over it. Neither the accumulation nor the walking is directed toward that outcome by anything in the simulation, so the base rate is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
- The live-world figures above are one snapshot at one tick, not a trend fit -- the two-day 3%-to-8.75% change is real but is not itself evidence of a constant or accelerating rate.
- Everything above called “the live world” was measured on the staging world that preceded Universe 1, under a different ruleset. Those measurements stand as taken; they are not measurements of Universe 1. See the dated update below.
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 H Part D two-islands exploratory run, the Phase I run, the Phase J matched comparison
- The two-islands method note, and the Phase S material-ecology record, section 6
- The simulation's population state, and its founder-origin field
- https://emergentlife.co.uk/api/v1/snapshot, read live for this update
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 →