The water is the wall: three worlds that explored everything they could reach
Across three full-length runs of the world we are preparing to found, no organism ever crossed water. Not once, in more than half a million organism-lifetimes. It would be easy to read that as incuriosity. It is not: within their own island they explore relentlessly, and were still finding ground they had never stood on at the very end of the run. What they never do is leave. The two islands have no land route between them, the offshore summit cannot be walked to from anywhere, and reaching either means building a causeway across open water -- which no organism has yet done.
The question
In a world with two separate islands, small offshore islets and a summit reachable only by building, where do organisms actually go?
The hypothesis, written first
None registered for this question. The runs were pre-registered as a readiness soak with its own gates; this is an analysis of where the organisms turned out to be, taken after those runs finished, and is reported as a description rather than as a test that passed or failed.
Setup
- Ruleset
- pre-genesis-candidate-v2, the candidate for Public Universe 1.
- Seeds
- Three, fixed in advance by the soak's own pre-registered rule.
- Duration
- 172,800 ticks each -- two simulated days, roughly 350 generations.
What was measured
- Every cell any organism has ever stood on, accumulated over the whole run.
- How many organisms stood on an islet, on the summit plateau, or on an island other than their ancestors', at every sample.
- Which places can be reached on foot at all, by flood-filling the world's own walkable ground from where the founders were placed.
Result
Organisms exhaustively and continuously explore the ground they can walk on, and never cross water. Every place none of them reached is a place that cannot be reached on foot.
Limitations
- Two simulated days and roughly 350 generations. A crossing that needs thousands of generations would not appear here.
- Three worlds, one run each.
- Reachability is computed on the ground as it is generated. Organisms reshape terrain as they go, so a route that does not exist at the start is not proof that none can ever be made -- that is precisely what building a causeway would mean.
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 pre-genesis final soak, its pre-registration, deviation and result
- The pre-genesis engine plan, section 5.6 revision 4
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 →