[HN Gopher] Show HN: Decided to play god this morning, so I buil...
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Show HN: Decided to play god this morning, so I built an agent
civilisation
at a pub in london, 2 weeks ago - I asked myself, if you spawned
agents into a world with blank neural networks and zero knowledge
of human existence -- no language, no economy, no social templates
-- what would they evolve on their own? would they develop
language? would they reproduce? would they evolve as energy
dependent systems? what would they even talk about? so i decided
to make myself a god, and built WERLD - an open-ended artificial
life sim, where the agent's evolve their own neural architecture.
Werld drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks that
evolve their own topology, 64 sensory channels, continuous motor
effectors, and 29 heritable genome traits. communication bandwidth,
memory decay, aggression vs cooperation -- all evolvable. No
hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they could evolve in
any direction. Pure Python, stdlib only -- brains evolve through
survival and reproduction, not backprop. There's a Next.js
dashboard ("Werld Observatory") that gives you a live-view:
population dynamics, brain complexity, species trajectories, a
narrative story generator, live world map. thought this would be
more fun as an open-source project! can't wait to see where this
could evolve - i'll be in the comments and on the repo.
https://github.com/nocodemf/werld
Author : urav
Score : 40 points
Date : 2026-02-28 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| dash2 wrote:
| I think it looks fun, but at the same time I really wish you had
| written the readme yourself and not using an llm. My view: if you
| can't be bothered to write it yourself, why should I read it
| myself?
| urav wrote:
| completely fair, and thanks for the nudge - expect an updated
| readme shortly
| urav wrote:
| got the updated version up and again, appreciate the nudge
| there!
| fd-codier wrote:
| No images in the README...
| Towaway69 wrote:
| And stupid leading emojis for the heading.
| alexhans wrote:
| I love emergent behaviour and story telling. Anyone who has
| played City builders like Sim City or roguelikes like Dwarf
| Fortress knows how interesting, fun and even informative they can
| be.
|
| In a world where setting them up and letting rogue agents run
| rampant becomes relatively low cost and fast, I think focusing on
| the desired outcomes, the story telling and specially the UX for
| the human user, is key and maybe we can take some learnings from
| Will Wright on "Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games"
| [1].
|
| I'm going to be unable to do much this weekend so I can't say
| I'll try check this out (yet?) but I'd be interested in your own
| experiences so far. Any surprises? Things you'd like to do next?
| What's most fun/challenging?
|
| An actual report/writeup will probably resonate more than a repo
| for people who can't check it out easily or are not willing to.
|
| - [1] https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-
| to-s...
| urav wrote:
| Appreciate this! and yeah the will wright talk is exactly what
| I was leaning into.
|
| Actually posted this on X 2 weeks ago, hosted the werld
| observatory public, and had gemini stream a new chapter of the
| story in natural language every 10,000 ticks - so it felt like
| reading through a david attenburgh novel of werld being born.
|
| Most interesting thing from the last run was definitely the
| language and the behaviours, they decoding what they were
| actually saying was a difficult one, and noticing them group
| within their diverged species.
|
| Up next, i want to get the storytelling side up and running too
| - kept running out of storage, and cloudflare playing up as
| usual - maybe get gemini to visualise each chapter - and get an
| upgraded interface for the werld observatory.
|
| If you want to check out my previous attempt at streaming the
| story line - it's still on my X -
| https://x.com/im_urav?s=21&t=6Si-w-DvNJC7RfvSz2Aw-w
| gyomu wrote:
| _> Werld drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks
| that evolve their own topology, 64 sensory channels, continuous
| motor effectors, and 29 heritable genome traits. communication
| bandwidth, memory decay, aggression vs cooperation -- all
| evolvable. No hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they
| could evolve in any direction._
|
| In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as
| he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
|
| "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
|
| "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe",
| Sussman replied.
|
| "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
|
| "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play",
| Sussman said.
|
| Minsky then shut his eyes.
|
| "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
|
| "So that the room will be empty."
|
| At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
| urav wrote:
| Love the MIT AI Koans. Minsky's actual words to Sussman were
| "well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they
| are." And he's right, the room isn't empty.
|
| Werld's room has walls. The graph topology, energy mechanics,
| metabolic costs, seasons, those are all design choices. But
| those are the physics, not the behavior. I chose the laws of
| nature, not what agents do with them.
|
| Whether they cooperate or attack, broadcast or stay silent,
| grow complex brains or prune them down, that's selection, not
| me.
|
| The agents also aren't randomly wired like Sussman's net --
| they start with minimal NEAT networks and evolve structure
| through survival. So the preconceptions are there, I just tried
| to make them physics rather than policy.
|
| Curious how you would approach removing those from an
| artificial sim like this?
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| some hand-wavy thoughts..
|
| > it has them (preconceptions), it's just that _you don 't
| know_ what they are.
|
| further in this direction... the "thing" might evolve into
| some cyclic (or not) system. a bit like that LIFE game,
| emerging a tv-tennis-like ping-ponging, or whatever. How
| would you know there is such thing? just stats/counts do not
| tell. (Which pulls another freaky question - how would u
| notice a _different_ intelligence /world-
| order/culture/resemblance-of?)
|
| maybe feature: some stop-gap animation over world-map in
| time? Then, some pattern analysis over that.. History of the
| world, part one..
|
| btw check these "interactive simulations", maybe some ideas
| about "loading" the agents with preconceptions :)
|
| https://ncase.me/
| mpalmer wrote:
| > _No hardcoded behaviours, no reward functions. - they could
| evolve in any direction._
|
| If they can hack their reward functions won't this always
| converge on some kind of agentic opium den?
| urav wrote:
| that would be true if there was a reward function.
| compute_reward() exists in the code, but it returns 0.0.
|
| they're only living/evolving to survive, and fork (reproduce).
|
| can't wirehead natural selection if the brain does nothing
| useful, they'd die and their genome would die with them.
| b800h wrote:
| This seems to start with 2 agents, and then all of their
| offspring die immediately. Any hints?
| b800h wrote:
| I take that back, I was falling asleep and then suddently had a
| population spike. Very good!
| urav wrote:
| should be starting with 30... if you're seeing 2 that might be
| an older default that I tried out (an adam and eve experiment).
| You can change it in the config too.
|
| On the dying immediately thing - offspring get a fraction of
| the parent's energy when they fork. If the parent forks too
| early (low energy), the kid spawns with barely anything and
| can't cover its tick cost + brain metabolic cost.
|
| That's working as intended -- reproducing too early is a bad
| strategy and selection should punish it. But if everything dies
| instantly, something else might be off.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| It is impossible to enforce a world free of heuristics, but this
| is certainly very cool.
|
| Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the circular QR
| code.
| urav wrote:
| completely agree on the heuristics (someone else mentioned the
| MIT Koan comment about this). And yeah Plaything is a little
| too close to home... no QR codes from werld agents yet though.
| Will keep you posted.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| I just wanted to add: there's no single piece of machinery
| that can void the human experience. A large collection of
| machinery can only delay the inevitable. Please have fun with
| your project.
| urav wrote:
| Agreed -- and I wouldn't want to simulate the human
| experience. What I'm more curious about is what experience
| agents would create for themselves, with no concept of
| ours.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| This is one or two steps removed from Thronglets.
| urav wrote:
| hopefully it stays that way.... although I did start setting up
| a rig to host them on.
| csmoak wrote:
| this reminds me of Polyworld by Larry Yaeger, an artifical life
| sim where each creature has a vision system. i played around with
| this back in the early 2000s though the hardware i had access to
| was basically insufficient to run it in any real way. it's nice
| to see its development has continued.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld
| urav wrote:
| Haven't come across Polyworld before -- just looked it up and
| its super cool, especially for 1994. The vision system is a
| interesting design choice. Werld takes a different approach --
| graph topology instead of a 2D plane, and NEAT brains instead
| of Hebbian learning -- but the core philosophy is the same.
|
| And yeah hardware has caught up a bit since the early 2000s,
| though my hard drive is having a hard time. Thanks for the
| reference, going to dig into Yaeger's papers.
|
| wonder if the black mirror episode was based on polyworld then?
| m0llusk wrote:
| Arguably a powerful demonstration of why even simple creatures
| make use of parenting as a strategy to improve the success of
| their offspring.
| urav wrote:
| This actually showed up in the first run, agents that invest
| more energy into offspring vs ones that fork cheap and fast.
|
| the ones that survived population crashes were the ones passing
| down leaner, better-inherited brains. Cheap forking works when
| there's plenty of energy around, falls apart in famine.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| This is a very different conclusion from the one in the
| scientific documentary "Idiocracy"
| e1ghtSpace wrote:
| I like the idea of evolving agents from scratch with no
| "learning", they just evolve their ability to survive in the
| environment. Maybe one day it'll be advanced enough to see life
| evolve.
|
| How does the narrative story generator work?
|
| I played around a bit with NEAT networks, and tried to create a
| bitcoin trading bot, but the best I could do was a +10% gain over
| many months. I was hoping for at least 30% each month. Oh well, I
| guess it doesn't all just depend on past price history.
| urav wrote:
| Thanks! The story generator is pretty simple right now -- every
| 10,000 ticks the sim snapshots population stats, brain
| complexity, species changes, births/deaths, communication
| activity and runs it through a template that writes a plain-
| english chapter.
|
| Building out a more engaging version, and will hopefully stream
| it onto X again as a story - but this time without chewing api
| tokens every couple of seconds.
|
| NEAT for trading is interesting - on BTC i used a kernels
| method that worked quite well and closer to that <2 sharpe on a
| monthly.
| urav wrote:
| Updated based on feedback -- added screenshots to the README and
| upgraded the story generator for a better narrative. Thanks for
| all the input.
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(page generated 2026-02-28 23:02 UTC)