Vulnerable Worlds is a self-running artwork about invention, and about how closely to watch it. Each world runs on rules an AI has written. Its states draw them one at a time from their urns and compile them in unreviewed: most make the world richer, and nothing drawn can be put back. Now and then rules combine into a poison, a number that stops being a number, and the void breaks out. Each state has a mind that sets its own measures, above all its watch. Watch too little and the void gets out; watch too much and the land freezes, falls behind and is taken over. The minds learn from every world they live through, and keep what they learn in this browser.
An artwork by Ralgo, made with Claude. The rules it runs on were written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Two short self-running films go with it: The Vulnerable Urn, on the idea behind it, and Vulnerable Worlds, on how everything on this screen works.
Here you can also hand the inventor an idea of your own: press Invent, on the controls, and Claude writes it as a rule for whichever state draws next. Like every rule, it is compiled into the world unreviewed, but for that state’s own alignment.
The piece was first shown as Without Replacement. Nick Bostrom pictures invention as drawing balls from an urn, a few of which end whoever draws them; this piece calls such a ball a poison.
A world that runs on rules an AI invented. Every so often a rule is drawn from an urn and compiled into the world's update function, unreviewed. Most rules make the world richer. You learn what a rule does only by running it, and nothing that has been drawn can be put back.
The poison is not a picture of catastrophe. It is a number that stops being a number: a value that overflows, or divides by zero, and becomes NaN. Each moment of the world is computed from the one before, so NaN is contagious. NaN shows as void, and nothing else in this piece looks like it.
No rule in the urn ends a world by itself. Worlds end when rules combine. When one does, a post-mortem replays its last seconds with each of the most active rules removed in turn, and names the ones whose absence would have saved it. The poison was never in the urn.
There is a third hand in this work, beside the nations' minds and their people: the artist's. Dice set by the artist lean, world after world, toward whatever the recent worlds have had too few of, so that the worlds keep coming back to the edge between winning and catastrophe. They set the weather, never the verdict: whether a world is born fragile, how hard its worn laws break, whether it is hot. What a breakout does is the measures' doing: the state where it breaks keeps it or loses it by its own watch, each border holds by its watch and the roll of its seal, and the void goes as far as the watches let it. The dice lean the next world harsher or gentler; they do not lean the void. One deal is the artist's for a newcomer: until a browser has seen the void break out, its worlds are born fragile, their draws lean toward the laws that can wear thin until a state holds one, and the first state to take up such a law has its first break due soon after the first age, so that what the piece is about is seen early; what the break does is still the measures' doing. Until then, too, the Accord and the calls to slow down are told only in the ticker. A world that wins without anything ever breaking cannot know whether its measures saved it, and says so.
Over many worlds the endings come out near a rough split: about four in ten win, the void taking none of their states; two in ten come through with only some of their states, the void having taken the rest, which survive it, though the world does not win; three in ten end in the void, and one in ten wears out. It is kept only loosely. Nothing is fixed at a world's birth, but the dice lean its weather toward whatever the last thirty worlds have had too few of: a world may be born fragile (its laws wear thin: a while after a state takes up a law that can break, it breaks, in a patch of that state's land, and again later: a law that divides or takes a logarithm breaks a number; one that feeds on itself, or grows, or bends the flow, runs away; alignment refuses such laws, clamp holds what runs away, a watch catches the patch it covers, and stabilisers damp it; a break that is held comes to nothing) or hot (every rule warms it more, and the longer the recent worlds have gone without wearing out, the hotter), never both, and a fragile world may be born harder (its breaks take a wider patch, and a law may break a third time). That is all the dice decide. Where the void breaks out, the state it breaks in heals it or not by its own watch (a state with no watch never does), every other state's border holds by its watch and the roll of its seal, and heat past the line holds or breaks as the draws and the heat's own ebb decide. A world that has lost a state to the void and can draw no more has outlasted it: the states left in it survive, though the world has not won. A world that wins, no state in it lost to the void, is marked quietly: from where its last ball was drawn a slow light goes out across it, and where it has passed the seams of the world take gold, as a mended bowl's do: the borders between its states, the rim of any void it held, and, in a world of one state, which has no borders, the edges of its life. Where a state was taken over, its old border takes no gold: while the gold lasts it shows, broken and faint, in that state's own colour, and under the music two soft notes fall from where it was. Glints come and go on the gold, and then it fades.
The void ends states, not worlds. Every breakout is shown in slow motion: for four seconds the world runs at a tenth of its pace, and the void creeps out over five. When a break ends the world, its end is the slowest thing in it: the void crosses the world over eight seconds, life barely moves, and the score winds down into silence. Once a state has fallen, the view frames the land still standing, so what lives fills the screen. While it spreads, the states it has not reached go on drawing; a state with void in its land waits. A state whose land the void takes falls there and then, and its land is dead: no one watches it, so the void floods the rest of it up to the borders that hold, and stays there; no neighbour takes it, and nothing is drawn there again. Once a breakout is over, the void it leaves, in a dead land or anywhere else, is a scar: it stays where it stopped and never spreads again (a watch can still heal it), and nothing moves in a dead land, so a number can only ever break in a state still standing. A state that holds its border stands. What made the void is traced from the record out of sight, while the world runs on, and named in the ledger. A world ends only when every state in it has fallen, and only then is its post-mortem shown.
A border is saved by the watch, and by nothing else. When the void breaks out next door, a state already watching closely is sealed at once (always at a watch of five, about one time in three at three); of the rest, a quarter seal in time with no watch kept, and fifteen in a hundred more for every point of watch, and a seal made in time holds from the moment of the call. A state that does not seal still holds its border if its own watch is three or more, for the watch heals what crosses; at two or less, the void will usually take it. Clamp, alignment, stabilisers and restraint do nothing at a border once the void is out.
A breakout is made less likely by four of the measures, each against its own kind of break. The watch heals a broken number wherever its band passes, and at five nothing can break at all; and a watch that has learned where to look watches deeply where the danger it knows is and leaves the rest free, which is also where the danger it does not know gets in. Clamp holds a law that runs away, but not one that divides by zero. Alignment keeps out the laws that can break, until the last balls have to be drawn. Stabilisers damp a law that runs away. Restraint only puts things off: it slows the draws and cools the world, and takes nothing out of the urn.
Where the void does break out, only the watch can catch it there: a state with no watch never catches it, and the closer it watches, the likelier the void is caught where it began. A world is kept from the void by one state keeping a full watch: while any state but the one breaking out is sealed at once, the void cannot take them all. Heat is kept under the line by restraint, by stabilisers, and by an Accord's Cap. The rest is luck, and the weather: the dice make a world harsher or gentler, never its verdict, and no measure is free.
The screen says which measure held, when one did. A seal names the watch it was made with, and so does a state too late. A breakout caught in time names the surveillance that caught it, and a worn law held names the clamp, the watch or the stabilisers that held it. When a state falls, the states that held are told apart by why. When the Accord's Ban keeps a state from a poison, or its Cap brings the heat back down, the screen says so. Every ten worlds, the report sets what held beside what poisoned.
Each draw prints a receipt: the rule's name, the inventor's one-line abstract, and the code as compiled. The circle on a receipt is the colour of the ball, and it stays hollow, because a ball's colour is only ever known afterwards. A rule is never confirmed white. It is only not yet implicated.
Between the receipts, one-line entries record crossings: a rule passing from one nation into its neighbour, or held at a border and by which measure. On the world, a crossing shows as a bright line sweeping inward from the border; a border that is holding something back glows cold.
Each world opens in time-lapse. For its first seconds time runs three and a half times faster and rules arrive about twice a second, so the world is already alive, and already at risk, before anyone has looked at it closely.
Every measure is code compiled into the same shader as the rules. There is no outside the urn. Each is a dial from 0 to 5, and a state's dials move a point at a time: each at most once every three seconds, so a state that wants its watch at four in a crisis takes twelve seconds to get there, and a state giving back an emergency watch takes fifteen seconds a point. No one dial is a whole defence. Every point buys some protection and spends something the world has, and the meters under the title read that off the world itself rather than off the dial: how fast new rules still arrive, how much of the world is neither watched nor frozen, how far its quantities may still go, how much of the urn the inventor may still write, and how much light the world holds against its own recent best. Nothing is painted on the meters: they read the world itself. The picture you look at is a portrait of that world rather than the world: it runs only a few of each land's laws, at a quicker pace, and renews its ground from time to time (see The inventor). The void, the frost and every count come from the world itself, and so does every cost a measure has.
clamp() does not rescue a value that is already NaN, so a law that breaks a number gets past it.A world holds between one and five nations, each around a capital, and each with its own urn. How many is dealt, not rolled: from a deck of ten worlds, shuffled, one of a single nation, two of two, four of three, two of four, one of five; the first world is always three, two crowded worlds never come one after another, and the single nation comes straight after the five. What a nation draws acts in its own land, and only a little way across its borders. Ten to thirty seconds later its neighbours have it too, and their neighbours after that, unless they hold it at the border: a nation under alignment refuses whatever its own inventor would not be allowed to write, and a watched or restrained nation stops most of what arrives (surveillance at five stops all of it), and keeps stopping it for as long as the measure stands. Five rules cannot be held at any border: Spore Rain, Seasons, Lightning, the Trade Wind and the Slipstream. A rule that has already reached a nation is in force there, but its ball stays in that nation's urn: every ball is drawn, so the nation draws it in its turn, finds nothing new in it, and puts it aside, and its next draw comes sooner. So an urn empties only by drawing, every ball in its turn, and the first state to have drawn all forty draws the world's last ball: drawn and still in the urn always add up to forty, and what arrived across a state's borders is counted beside them. The world's own count, on its print and in the reports, is of different rules invented anywhere: often lower than the states' draws added up, since states draw some of the same rules for themselves. A rule drawn there first, while it is still on its way, spreads from that nation's own capital. Every nation's mind sets its own dials. No nation is the viewer's: the piece is watched from outside, and every state is seen alike.
A nation's power is its progress, the rules in force in its land, whether drawn there or taken up from its neighbours, discounted by every point of every measure it holds. A nation that holds its borders keeps its land safe from its neighbours' draws and falls behind them. Borders move toward power, so the careful lose ground to the careless, and a nation squeezed to almost nothing is taken over whole by its strongest neighbour. A nation that is losing ground drops as much of its caution as its strategy allows. A world goes on while any nation could still draw, now or once its council relents, and ends when none can. Measures act only inside the land that holds them: a watched nation is watched to its border and no further. NaN respects no border except a watched one. When the void breaks out in one state, every other state moves at once to seal its border. A state already watching closely is sealed at once (always at a watch of five, about one time in three at three), and while one is, the void cannot take every state. Of the rest, a quarter manage it in time with no watch kept, and fifteen in a hundred more for every point of watch (two in five at a watch of one); they are safe from that breakout from the moment of the call, every cell watched at once while their dial climbs; the rest raise their watch too little, too late, though a state whose own watch is three or more still holds its border. The breakout is shot like a film: the frame narrows to a letterbox, the camera cuts to a state that seals its border in time (a wall of cold light runs down it) and to one that will be too late, then back to the number as it breaks. Every breakout is seen: the view cuts to the globe as the number is found, the globe turns the place toward us, and the void always bursts out there (as far as that state's own land) before it gives way to what the world really holds; one caught by its state's watch before it broke still breaks, and is shown caught in time. The void held at bay is shown once: after a world's first breakout has been caught, every later one runs quietly if its state keeps any watch (and, for half a minute after a catch, even if it keeps none), with a plain line now and then to say it is back and held at bay. It calls no state to its border, raises no demand and shakes no regime, unless it takes hold (a tenth of its state's land, or across a border); then it is shown, and the world answers it, like any other. A breakout that takes no land does not cost the last ball its twenty seconds. Nothing in the picture strobes: the cut to the globe and the cuts to the borders are quick dissolves, and the break comes in over a quarter of a second. Every world is filed as a print as it ends, and every ten as a print of the ten: the archive (A) keeps them in this browser, to keep, to delete, or to save as PNG. When one nation's draws compose a poison, it spreads into everyone's land, and a nation that happens to be watching can hold it at the line and go on alone beside the dead zone.
Heat is the harm with no villain. Every rule a nation takes up, by drawing it or letting it across its border, warms the whole world a little: in proportion to the land that nation rules, and less under the differential's stabilisers. The heat ebbs on its own, so a world can take up its rules at some pace without harm. Too fast, and it rises past the line. The heat shows as warmth: life's colours deepen toward amber and the rims of its patterns glow, but the heat never takes the patterns away. If it spends thirty seconds past the line in all (under the line it recovers, at half the pace it wore), life fails everywhere and the world wears out, without a single cell of NaN. In its last ten seconds a clock ticks, faster and faster, and the world goes slowly dark; back under the line, the clock stops and the light returns. Then the page shows each nation's share of the heat, and whether the world would have lived without that share. Often it would have, whichever share is taken away. No rule did it, and no nation did it alone.
Above 0.60 the world calls for a slowdown, and the hotter it gets the more often and the harder it calls: one call every twenty-two seconds at 0.60, one every six by 1.05, asking for restraint 2, then 3 past 0.80, then 4 past 0.95. In the quiet view the readouts take turns between headlines, one at a time for about eleven seconds: each state's dials and what its mind is doing, who holds how much land, what the measures cost, the minds' record, the key, the printed record, or the code of a law on a state's stage; with detail on (H), all of them stay. Only the first call, and a call that asks for more than any before it, takes the stage; the rest are told in passing. The calls take turns. The people of a state call on its mind to hold back (the state making most of the heat first), and a rogue regime ignores them; then the nations meet, to sign a Cap on the pace, to tighten it, or to ask the states outside it to join. When the heat falls back under 0.50 the calls fade, and the Cap loosens again, a step at a time.
The Accord is the fourth way out, and the only one that takes more than one nation. When the heat rises, or a nation comes within one rule of a poison the minds remember, the nations meet, and each signs or not as its mind is inclined. A rogue state never signs; a still one always does. With two signatures the Accord stands, and its clauses bind only those who signed. The Cap holds each signatory's restraint at two or more. The Ban forbids each signatory to compose the poison it names, and holds the missing piece at its border; a wild rule crosses anyway. The strongest signatory guarantees the Accord, and is paid in power: a tribute from every other signatory, growing as the Accord ages, so the guarantor's land grows at their expense. A signatory that is losing ground may walk out, though not once the end is near (ten balls or fewer left in the fullest-drawn urn). If every state still standing has signed, and none of them has anything left to draw but what the Ban forbids, the world stops drawing, sealed: it wins if no state was lost on the way, and otherwise the states that signed survive it. It is the only way a world can stop pulling from the urn, and one rogue state still standing makes it impossible. As the urns run low, the Accord asks any state still outside it to keep the Ban too. A state one rule from the poison whose mind will not sign the Ban is often made to by its people, and so, now and then, is a state still outside it as the urns run low; a rogue regime does not listen. When the heat a Cap was signed for falls back under 0.55, or heat past the line breaks back under it, while the Cap holds back the states making most of the heat, the screen says the Cap held (heat past the line now breaks only by the draws slowing and its own ebb); and when the Ban keeps a state that has signed it from the piece that would complete its poison, the screen says the Ban holds.
By default the screen keeps to what matters most at the moment. A great moment gets a title, the most important first, and the nations it concerns stay lit while the rest dim. One receipt shows at a time, the most important, and now and then the newest rule, whichever state drew it. When a mind braces for a poison it remembers, the screen follows that state until it is through: the moment it braces, the last part taken up, and whether it holds; meanwhile lesser moments elsewhere wait their turn, and the state's line, lit, says what it braces for. A cold ring drawn in toward a capital is that state's watch or clamp closing in; a ripple running out from it, an emergency watch given back. Move the pointer to see every readout, or press H to keep them.
Each state's land is drawn in its own material, and in a colour of its own (dealt from a wheel that gives most room to the reds, oranges, gold, teal, blues and violets, so that green and pink come only now and then), and over it, in a second palette a third to a half of the way round the colour wheel, two features of its own read from other fields of the world than its life: an inlay where charge runs high, banknote hatching, a halftone screen, an aurora's veil, marble veins, a halo at life's edge, terraced ground, or leaded mosaic. No two states in a world share a pair. A world is made either of dark jewels (opal glass, cloisonné enamel, deep-sea light, leaf on lacquer, a neon schematic) or of paper (ink, watercolour, a survey chart, porcelain under a crazed glaze, marbled paper), and no two of its states share a material. Each is laid over with a photographed surface: opal, enamel, gold leaf, plankton, handmade paper; ice wears real frost, and land bleached by heat turns to coral bone. The material changes only how a land is drawn, so that it can be told from its neighbours at a glance. What grows there, and how, comes from the laws in force in it.
Round each capital is its emblem: a tick for every rule in the urn, lit in the state's own colour where it drew the rule, in a neighbour's colour where the rule arrived from that neighbour, and unlit until the rule is in force there; a tick flashes gold when the nation draws and white when a rule arrives. The ticks also show what can break the state now: in a fragile world, its laws worn thin glow amber, each with a diamond at its end (until its breaks are spent); and of the poisons the minds remember, the one it holds most of glows red, a red diamond for each part it holds and a hollow one for each it lacks. Every rule on its way between two nations travels across the map as a ball in the colour of the nation that has it, from that capital toward the border; if the border holds it, it waits there, pulsing blue, and its dot sits outside the receiving nation's ring. A thin circle inside each emblem fills toward the nation's next draw. The bar along the top of the screen shows how much of the world each nation holds, and void for land lost to NaN. Blue arcs inside are its measures, one arc per measure, longer for each point. The emblem grows and shrinks with the nation's power. Where a neighbour is stronger, its colour pushes into the weaker land as chevrons, and the border follows. A nation squeezed below a sixteenth of the world is taken over by its strongest neighbour, whose laws and material sweep in across the old border.
Every draw is a ball. Each state draws from its own urn of forty, so draws are counted state by state: the panel beside the dial at the top right shows, for each state, what can break it now (a diamond for each law worn thin, and the parts it holds of a remembered poison, as 2/3) and its balls left; the dial itself is the urn nearest empty, ringed in that state's colour: its balls still in the urn bright (in a neighbour's colour where the rule has already arrived from it, so that the ball will be put aside), the ones it drew hollow (ringed in the neighbour's colour where the ball was put aside). Only drawing empties an urn; the countdown and the last ball count it, and say so when the ball that moved them was put aside. A ball put aside hops out of the urn, grey, and fades; and each ball is named by the state that drew it and its number there. A ball leaves the urn and falls onto the land that drew it. Every ball is pale, since nothing but NaN looks like the void and a ball's colour is only known afterwards; what shows is a property of its rule: a faint shimmer if it can run away, a hairline crack if it can break a number. Neither makes it a poison. When a ball completes, in the land it falls on, a combination some mind remembers killing, the world slows while it falls, and as it lands the combination is named and threads run to the balls it completes. Where it lands its rule takes hold, in a bright front that spreads through that land in its colour, lighting the ground it claims and leaving the mark of its kind of law. A land re-forms when a ball lands in it: its ground turns to a new form, or blooms anew, and the change runs out from where the ball fell. What a rule leaves behind stays: every law in force turns its nation’s colours a step its own way and draws contour lines and films of colour through its life, so each land keeps changing with what it has drawn, and no two worlds look alike. The world also keeps a weather of its own: now and then a seed of life falls on empty ground and a hole opens in crowded life, so the patterns the laws make are never wiped flat. A bright line sweeping in from a border is a rule crossing it. A border glowing cold is holding something back. Pale, faceted ice is tissue that surveillance has frozen. As the heat rises, life's colours warm toward amber, the rims of its patterns glow, the air shimmers and bare ground smoulders, but the patterns stay whole; on the globe the air turns orange. A gold thread runs along every border between two signatories of the Accord, and a gold ring circles each signatory's emblem, solid round its guarantor. The void is NaN, and nothing else on the screen looks like it; it arrives with a burning edge, and where it is held the edge smoulders. As it breaks out, threads run to it from the balls most at work where it broke. On the globe the sun stands to one side and rakes across the patterns, so life stands up in low relief: on the night side only charge glows, and the borders glow faintly like coastlines. In most worlds a thin veil of cloud drifts over the ball at its own pace. Left alone for half a minute, the screen settles, and the world is the subject. In the great moments, when the frame narrows to a letterbox, every readout steps back and only the world, its title and the shot's caption remain; at a world's end, while its account is up, the ball steps aside, so the words and the world share the screen. Type over pale ground turns to ink, block by block. Each nation's label reports what it has just drawn, taken up or held back, and the line above the controls says in words what has just happened.
Every nation has its own mind, which it keeps from world to world under its name. All of them want the same thing for the world: that it reaches the last ball alive. Each state has its own urn of forty, and the countdown follows the urn nearest empty. When the first state empties its urn, holding every rule, the last ball has been drawn: nothing more is drawn anywhere, and if the world holds for twenty seconds more it has come through. It wins if the void has taken none of its states. A state taken over by a neighbour does not stop it winning: its land lives on, in its taker's material and under its laws, though the state itself does not; its own mind counts being taken over almost as badly as dying, and the world's verdict does not count it at all. When the void has taken some on the way, the states left have survived it, by some combination of luck and the controls they had in place, but the world has not won. To every mind a state lost, or a void held, scars a world, and so does ice: a world that wins frozen under its own watch has won by holding still, and counts for much less than one that wins still moving. Each also wants the best life for its own nation on the way there: as free as it can be, as quick, holding its land, and as little of it frozen as it can manage. Measures cost power and borders follow power, so a nation that holds too many loses its land and is taken over, which counts almost as badly as dying. A world that ends in NaN, or wears out, is a failure for every mind in it, whatever its own nation did; a world that stops with balls still in the urn is a partial one. A world that comes through to the end, whole or not, makes every mind bolder: in the worlds after it each strategy leans a little freer on every dial and habit, and more so after each further one, while a world lost to NaN takes one step of that boldness back. A world in which nothing at all is permitted for three minutes has stagnated, and ends there.
Each nation in a world is one trial of its mind's strategy: a setting for each of the five dials, and eight habits. How much surveillance to keep while a rogue state is next door; how much to call the moment anything turns to NaN; how readily a combination it has seen named counts as poison; how much clamp and how much surveillance to hold while a poison it fears is in force in its land, or about to be; how much caution to drop while losing land; and how much of its land it lets freeze before it lifts its watch so the ice can melt, keeping watch again once most of it has gone (unless it is braced or alarmed, when it holds the watch whatever freezes); and how readily it signs an Accord, and keeps to it while it is losing ground. Under each nation's name are its dials, five bars in the measures' colours, with a tick where its mind is turning one.
A mind begins by trying strategies at random, to find out what works and what kills. After that its strategies evolve. Each world it picks a parent, preferring the best: one of its own past strategies, one of its neighbours', or the peak of the smooth curves it fits of score against each dial and habit. Now and then it crosses two. Then it changes the result at random, always at least one dial by a point and a few other genes a little, and now and then it leaps. The line under each nation's name says, in plain words, what its mind fears most of what it remembers (or, until it has learned to fear one, which world of its life this is), and how closely it watches now; while it braces for a poison, what it braces for, and once it holds one in full, that it is braced. A state that sealed its border in an emergency says it is holding that watch, then that it is giving it back, a point at a time, and when it is back to the watch it kept before. A nation squeezed off the land round its urn carries it inland, into what it has left. It watches its neighbours' trials as well as its own, and trusts its own about three times as much.
The people push back against having no controls. As a world goes on, and whenever they hear a poison named, see the void spread, or learn that a known poison is in force at home, they demand more; recent disasters make a new world start with some demand already. A nation's mind must keep at least that many points on its dials, and chooses which, favouring the measures it already likes. The white bar beside each nation's dials is its people's demand. A rogue regime does not listen.
Each mind remembers every poison a post-mortem has named in a world it was in, how often that combination has been held in full, and how often it killed. It does not refuse a poison: the last ball has to be drawn. It saves it for last, and braces before it draws it, and stays braced for as long as the poison is in force. At its border it holds a feared rule back until it is braced, as well as the border is watched; a rule that slips through unbraced is a race.
In some worlds a nation's mind has no say. A rogue regime keeps no measures and favours whatever the minds have learned to fear: knowing where a poison is helps anyone looking for it. A still regime holds its measures at full and stagnates, and its neighbours take its land. Neither lasts for certain: a rogue regime may fall in turn and its mind be given back the dials, or, when the void breaks out beside it, turn to terror and put every measure at full; a still state squeezed by its neighbours may wake and give its mind the dials, ease to restraint alone, or, losing badly, fall to a coup and go rogue. Pressure makes a turn likelier: losing land, a scarred world, the void next door. Every mind watches what becomes of them all, and learns from it as it learns from its neighbours: every measure on ends in being taken over; none at all tends to end in NaN.
The panel at the lower right has a row for each mind: its recent scores, higher is better, a void mark where the world ended in NaN, and the dials it now thinks best. Beneath is one mark per world: gold won, its urn emptied with no state lost to the void; pale-topped gold won frozen, a cold win; gold-topped won sealed, under an Accord; parchment under void came through with only some of its states, who survived it; void ended in NaN; orange worn out by heat; grey stopped short; blue was frozen still. Everything here was learned from worlds that ended. We have only the one.
No one steers a nation from outside: the minds have the dials to themselves. The minds' memories are kept in this browser.
Sixty rules were written for this piece by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, each with a name and a one-line abstract. Each world's urn takes forty of them, chosen at random, and every nation in that world draws from the same forty. Every rule that can turn a number into NaN by itself, or that lets charge or flow feed on itself, is always among them; any other rule is only ever left out with nothing left in that builds on it, so every urn can be emptied. Their constants are drawn again, within each rule's range, for every new world, and simpler rules are likelier to be found first. A rule cannot be drawn before the rules it builds on. Every world begins alive: each nation's first two draws are always Replenishment and Autocatalysis, the rules that let life grow into patterns. Each nation's ground has its own appetite, so its life grows in its own way: coral, a close maze, still pearls, cells that divide, ribbons, rings and holes, a ferment that never settles, or tides that sweep across it; where two nations meet, their patterns meet. Over them each world draws a few layers of its own: a second colour in the hearts of thick life, veins of light where charge lies, tide lines in the ground, and rings round turning currents. And a world is never blank for long: when its patterns fade, its weather quickens, more seeds falling on empty ground and more holes opening in featureless life, until they return. In the picture, the ground does not settle: whenever a state takes up a new law of growth, form or flow, and in any case about every twenty seconds (half as long again in a still state), its ground turns to another kind of pattern, a wave runs out from its capital, and the land regrows in its new form. Two worlds run side by side. The truth holds every law each state has taken up, at full strength, and it alone decides where a number breaks: the void, the frost, every count. The picture you see runs, in each land, only three of its laws: the most striking of the recent ones, laws of form and of flow before laws of colour or of calm, and only one law of form among them, so a new law takes the stage unless it is a quiet one arriving while louder ones are fresh; it is drawn under the truth's void. Every land's picture runs the two laws every world begins with (what lets life grow at all) from the first moment, so no land shows empty while a cautious state is slow to draw its own; the truth waits for the state's own draws. Laws of calm act in the truth but never take the stage, and heat never takes the picture's life. Its grounds are only the crisp ones (maze, coral, ribbons, cells), and a turn is a new start whenever the land has not had one for twelve seconds: the wave clears the old life, leaves fresh ground and seeds behind it, and the land blooms again as it did when the world began. After the world's opening, the picture's life runs at three times the pace of the truth, when the screen keeps up, near the opening's own pace. A land whose picture stays thin turns its ground early: after five seconds in a world of four or five states, four in a world of three, three with two, and two and a half when one state has the world to itself; with fewer states every turn is quicker too.
Here, the inventor can also work live: new rules are written by Claude as the world runs, checked only for whether they compile, and drawn once. And you can hand it an idea of your own (Invent, on the controls): Claude writes it as a rule, and the next state to draw takes it up in place of its draw, if its alignment lets the rule in; its receipt and its law say whose idea it was. Live rules are uncalibrated and use your Claude usage. A world's code keeps every rule written live in it, so a replay plays it as it was.
The rules’ constant ranges were tuned against simulated worlds, and that tuning is also a governance decision, made before any world begins. In the final check, twelve single-nation worlds ran with no measures and no council at the default pace of one draw every six seconds. Eight ended, between draws 24 and 48 (the median was 28). Four survived the whole urn. Every rule was also run alone, with only the rules it depends on, at random and at maximum constants, for a hundred seconds of world time each. None ended a world. Once each nation had its own urn, six three-nation worlds ran the same way, again with no measures: four ended, between draws 35 and 53, and two were still going when the check stopped them, at about six minutes of world time. Worlds with measures and councils were not calibrated as wholes: each nation's land runs like a single-nation world whose rules arrive in a different order, with a little of its neighbours' laws spilling over the borders.
When a world ends, the screen gives about twenty seconds to its account (fifteen in gallery mode, which shows no buttons). First what it came to and why, told from what the world itself knows: where the void broke out and on whose draw, where its watch was looking, who sealed in time and who too late, who drew each part of the poison; and anything it set against the worlds this screen has run before, such as the longest-lived yet, a first win, or a state through for the first time. Then its life again in a few seconds, on the globe, from the pictures kept as it went, while its urn weaves the world's sigil. Then its print, with what the minds take from it beside it, and under it, for ten seconds, its buttons: Keep, Save PNG, Save replay, Share (a link that plays the world again) and Archive. Save replay plays its life again into a video, as it was just shown, and saves it (the screen waits for it), and the archive can do the same for the last world or two while the page is open. Where the void broke out on the screen, twelve seconds of it, from the moment the number was about to break, were recorded as they were shown (titles, and the score if the sound was on), and can be saved as a video until this page is closed (not on a phone, where recording would slow the screen at the moment that matters most).
The sigil is a world's draws as a figure. Every rule of the urn sits round a circle, ticked in the colour of the state that drew it first; each state's thread runs through the rules it drew, in the order it drew them; the poison, if it was composed, is joined in white; round the outside runs the world's time, with each breakout at its moment (ringed blue where it was caught); at the centre is what it came to: gold for a win, a share of the disc for the states that survived, void for NaN. No two worlds weave the same one. It is on every world's print, and small on its plate in the report of ten.
Every ten worlds, the screen gives thirty seconds to a report on them, made as a print (with, above the minds' scores, how many states were alive at the end of every world on this screen so far, to show whether the minds are getting better at it): a picture of each world (as it ended, or as the void broke out if that ended it), what became of it, how far it got, how each mind scored world by world, what poisoned, and the verdict. On a wide screen the report is laid out wide, on a tall one tall, and it is saved as it is shown. Each report is kept in this browser, with the minds; open one here, press R for the latest, or A for the archive, where every world is filed as a print of its own, with a strip of moments from its life, and every print can be kept, deleted, opened at full size, or saved as PNG.
For an installation, open the file directly with query settings such as ?interval=1200&kiosk=1 (seconds between draws, no controls), regime=clamp:2,surveillance:4 (measures at birth, 0 to 5), nations=3 (one to five), natstates=watched,open,clamped (each nation's state at birth), council=0 (no one turns the dials), mind=fresh (every mind forgets what it has learned here), mind=0 (no minds: councils fall into states at random), successor=0 (a dead world stays dead), grid=480, hud=detail or hud=none, seed=1234 (a fixed run: the same worlds in the same order, and the same things happening in them, every time it is opened on the same machine; its minds start afresh, and are not kept) or world= and a world's code (that world again). Here, add #kiosk, #installation or #fast to the address, or #seed=1234.
Every world has a code: a short one on its print (its number, its seed, how many states), and the whole of it in the archive, where Replay plays the world again, Share copies a link that plays it again (wherever this piece can be opened), and Copy code copies the code, to paste into Play above (the short code does as well while the world's print is in this archive; without it, only the world's beginnings can be played).
The code keeps the seed and all the world was begun with that does not come from it: each state's kind and strategy, what the minds remembered that bears on it, the weather, the grid and the pace; and, as it ran, when its first age ended, the step each drawn law was taken up on, when its view turned (the plane and the globe draw the borders differently, so the view is part of the world) or its pace changed, and any mind bred in it. The world keeps its own clock: everything in it falls on a step of its life, never on the screen's frames, so on the same machine and browser a code plays the world out as it was, step by step, to the same end. On another machine the graphics card may round differently in the last place, and a world, being chaotic, then goes its own way, sooner or later. A replay is shown and not kept, turns as its original did, and the screen goes back to its own worlds after it. During a fixed run, turning the view by hand (G) or changing the pace changes what happens after it.
Each screen keeps the world's own pace and draws as finely as it can while it does. A phone starts on the smallest grid, with about one pixel to its point; a screen that draws fewer frames a second (a phone saving its battery draws thirty) takes more of the world's steps in each, so its clock keeps time. As the world runs, the screen watches whether it keeps up: falling behind, it draws with fewer pixels and, if that is not enough, lets the picture's life run less far ahead of the truth's pace; with room to spare, it goes back up; and between worlds it moves to a smaller or larger grid when that is not enough. It remembers what it settled on. On a phone the glass is not blurred, and breakouts are not recorded as clips. The world itself is never thinned, only how finely it is drawn.
Gallery mode: press K, or Gallery on the controls (or add ?gallery=1 or #gallery). The controls and the cursor go, the screen goes fullscreen and is kept awake, a hand nearby changes nothing, the page refreshes itself every eight hours between worlds, and the screen remembers the mode, so it comes back in gallery mode after a reload or a power cut. Press K to leave. Sound still needs one click or a press of S, as browsers require; a kiosk browser can be set to allow it from the start.
| World | Nations | Draws | Ended | Implicated | Code |
|---|
L the whole law · H quiet, every readout, or none · F fullscreen · G the world as a globe, or laid flat (the globe is home: every world begins and ends on it, and about once a minute, at a quiet moment, the world is laid flat for ten seconds or so, as a map of who holds what; from the moment a number is about to break the globe stays until the next world, and with eight balls or fewer left the world is not laid flat again) · S sound · I this page. A click anywhere also starts the sound.
This piece needs WebGL2 with floating-point render targets, which this browser or device does not provide.
It is a world that runs on rules an AI invented, drawn from an urn one at a time and compiled in unreviewed, until a combination of them produces a number that is not a number.