A sealed jar under a lamp.

Closed in matter, open to light

Every world is a grid of cells. Each cell holds some nutrient, biomass, membrane and waste, a little free energy, and a set of inherited numeric weights that decide what it does with them. Light shines in and gets stored as biomass; work releases it again as heat, which leaves. Nothing else gets in or out unless you open the jar yourself with Feed or Drain, and the lab logs every time you do. So waste has to be recycled, or the jar slowly stalls.

All of this is done in whole numbers. That is what lets the lab check, as the world runs, that not one quantum of matter was lost or made, and replay a run bit for bit on another supported GPU.

Individuals are counted, never declared

The starting patterns carry genomes, but the program does not say where an organism begins or ends. It counts connected structures, lineages, splits, merges, mutations, resource roles, and recovery after a wound. Those labels are measurements of patterns the rules produced.

Those measurements have limits. A recent check found that the parent the tracker credits with a birth often contributed no copied material, so a tracked birth is not treated as proof of reproduction on its own.

An attractive image is a great reason to keep exploring. When we want to explain a behaviour, repeated runs and controls help separate a promising impression from a repeatable effect.

Plant a world, then change something

1. Open the lab and pick a starting world and a seed number.
2. Press Play and give it time. Look for a body, a moving edge, or a pattern that keeps coming back.
3. Pick up Look and click a cell to see what is in it. Then pick up Wound and clear a patch. It feels mean. It is also the best question you can ask a world: does it grow back?
4. Plant the same world with the same seed number again. The same history returns, every time, as long as you leave it alone: wounds, feeds and donor picks are extra inputs, and the lab logs them. Save a copy of any moment you want to come back to.