Watch the findings run

A quadcopter with a battery, a forward sensor that cannot see behind it, one knife-range weapon and four guided interceptors. Nothing about how it flies is written down. An island breeds controllers continuously, sits a frozen exam it never trains against, and every twenty seconds publishes one whole fight as a recording, which this page plays. It is not a raid yet: an island is still fighting its own drills.

Islands of persons who hold two kinds of belief: what they were told, and what they have seen. Every formal model of cultural evolution runs on a graph somebody drew; here an island is a machine, a partition is a barrier nobody chose, and each island decides who may land. Scaffold: four islands are deployed and hold no people, so the page reports which of five states it is in rather than drawing an empty chart. It will draw beliefs, never a map.

An island on a machine in the lab: plants grow, creatures forage, breed and starve, and it says what happened. Nothing has a brain yet, so the creatures walk at random — they are the null forager any later brain has to beat. This page subscribes and draws the last frame that arrived; it runs no world of its own and shares no code with the islands. Starvation outnumbers old age about seventy to one, which is another way of saying selection pressure exists.

Two populations of faber-tweann networks coevolve; every move is a live forward pass. Watch a champion chase end in a capture, and the honest outcome: disengagement, not an arms race. A two-sided race is a knife-edge.

Numbers, not networks, on purpose: the trait escalates without bound while the score against current rivals stays flat. The measurement trap that calibrates the ruler before we trust it on the real engine.

A maze built as a trap: the way to the goal first leads away. Goal-chasing jams in the cul-de-sac; novelty search walks around and out. Watch two champions race, then evolve it live.

Evolve a pole-balancer, then reverse its motor mid-run. A fixed controller topples; a plastic one re-wires itself to recover. Evolution and physics both run live on the engine.