EX NIHILO

Sterile

universe Multiverse

What is this?

A grid of 32,400 programs, 64 bytes each, that starts as pure random noise. Every epoch each program is glued to a random neighbour, the 128 bytes are run as code in a ten-instruction language, and the result is cut in half again. There is no goal and no reward, and no replicator is planted.

Sooner or later, programs that copy themselves appear anyway and take over. The first ones are usually fragile and die out. This page detects them by testing whether a program really rebuilds itself on inert tape, never by what it looks like.

Based on Computational Life (Agüera y Arcas et al., 2024). Every universe is fully determined by its seed, so a shared link replays the same history.

Controls

scroll / pinch
zoom, all the way down to single instructions
drag
pan
click
put a cell under the microscope, or use the selected tool
Space
run / pause
S
advance one epoch
1 2 3
code, species and activity views
F
fit the universe to the screen
N
new random universe
P
save a picture
M
sound: noise while sterile, a chord of the dominant species once alive
Epoch0
Epochs / s0
VM steps / s0
Alive0%
Complexity0.00
living cellscomplexity
<> move head 0 {} move head 1 -+ change a byte ., copy a byte [] loop every other byte does nothing
each colour is one lineage of replicators dark cells are not alive
bright: a program is being overwritten a colony at rest is dark
out of nothing
EX NIHILO

Behind this text are 2,073,600 random bytes, arranged as 32,400 tiny programs. Every moment, neighbours are glued together and run as code. That is the only rule.

None of these programs can copy itself, and nobody is going to help them. Keep watching anyway.

scroll to zoom all the way down to the code · click any cell to put it under the microscope