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