RN-012

West is gone: the two founder populations met, crossed, and one of them did not survive it

Public Universe 1's two founder populations, WEST and EAST, were placed on separate islands with no land route between them (RN-004, RN-011). They have since made contact, crossed in both directions, and as of this note WEST's founder line has no living members anywhere: every organism alive in Universe 1 descends from EAST, and a third of them are standing on what used to be WEST's island.

Exploratory Open question 2 October 2026

The question

If the two founder populations ever do cross and meet, what happens next -- do they coexist, or does one population's presence on the other's island displace it?

The hypothesis, written first

None registered for this question. RN-004 and RN-011 pre-registered and measured whether a crossing would happen at all; nothing was pre-registered about what follows one, because until it happened there was nothing to write a hypothesis about.

Setup

Ruleset: pre-genesis-candidate-v2, Public Universe 1's frozen physics.
Seeds: Public Universe 1 only -- one universe, not a multi-seed campaign. See limitations.
Duration: 821,955 ticks since genesis (21 September 2026) as of this note; the crossings below happened between tick 738,626 and tick 781,193.

What was measured

FIRST_CROSSING and FIRST_CONTACT_BETWEEN_FOUNDER_POPULATIONS, each a one-shot event that fires at most once per universe, read from the production events table.
The live spectator contract's population.west, population.east and contact.crossing_count fields, which report the current island each living organism's founder lineage is standing on, not a cumulative tally of past crossings.

Result

Observed result

WEST and EAST made contact, crossed in both directions, and WEST's founder line has since gone extinct while EAST now occupies part of WEST's former island. This is Public Universe 1's first answer to a question RN-004 and RN-011 left open: contact did not lead to stable coexistence.

A close isometric view of Universe 1: a dense coastal forest with dozens of living organisms visible among the trees, a rocky shallows and a small raised landmass beyond. Every figure on screen is a real, currently-alive organism. — Isometric Watch, a Lab benefit previewed live and publicly at /watch-isometric/preview -- captured 2 October 2026. This crop is not identified as West or East land; it shows the density of the living population, not the island comparison below.

Universe 1's world map, both islands visible: West on the left shows no orange organism markers at all, East on the right is dense with them, and a scatter of orange markers now sits on West's own coastline and inland. The ringed islet and the circular summit both sit in the strait between the two. — Captured live from the public Watch page, 2 October 2026, day 8232 -- West 0, East 396, “They have met.”

Limitations

What this does not establish

N=1. This is one universe's history, not a campaign across seeds, and nothing here should be read as a rate or a probability.
No mechanism is measured. Competition for resources, direct conflict, and simple demographic drift after contact are all consistent with the numbers above, and none has been distinguished from the others here.
The exact tick WEST's population reached zero is not in the record; everything about the transition between the second crossing and the current snapshot is unmeasured.

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 production events table, runs/public/cd49bef0158a438bab39ca00fc8e237a/history.sqlite
https://emergentlife.co.uk/api/v1/snapshot, read live for this note
This project's running specification, §100, which carries the same figures

The rest of this note · Emergent Life Lab

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 →