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…
Decided to play god this morning, so I built an agent civilisation launched on February 28, 2026 with 51 votes, #576 of 16,627 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
WERLD is an open-ended artificial life simulator where agents with evolving neural networks develop their own behaviors from scratch. Thirty agents are placed in a world with no hardcoded behaviors or reward functions, starting only with blank NEAT neural networks and basic sensory and motor capabilities. Their genomes evolve heritable traits including communication bandwidth, memory, and cooperation levels. The simulator, built in pure Python, lets researchers observe whether agents spontaneously develop language, social structures, reproduction, and energy-dependent systems entirely through evolutionary processes.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
agentic life simulation from inception. Contribute to nocodemf/werld development by creating an account on GitHub.
A real-time artificial life simulation. In Werld, agents are given a computational ecosystem of their own - they start with NEAT neural networks as brains, genome traits, behavioural inclinations and the ability to evolve in any dirction. They have no idea that the human world exists, what a society is, even what to do as a being. Think of it as a computational version of the truman show: agents can perceive, act, reproduce, and die. Their genomes evolve. Brains get more complex (or simpler, if that works better). Communication, memory, and motor patterns are all discoverable — we left everything up to them, nothing's hardcoded. The goal is open-ended evolution: see what emerges from an…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- OHOne Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOCJan 2026 · emsh.cat · ▲324
Related: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/one-human-one-agent-on...
OzBrain, a shared brain for knowledge between agents and your teamAug 2026 · ozbrain.com · ▲93I think agent-first chat interfaces will be a primary software modality and busy dashboard/UI will go away. I’m not sure who exactly wins it, but I want my knowledge to grow/go with me. A lot of the “knowledge” ie research, analysis, reasoning will be done by agents as the primary user. Our current notes tools & tasks management systems were built for humans… I don’t care what the 17th thing on my bug backlog is. I want to conduct agents that can execute for me and do great work. What I built OzBrain to do: + Create a central place for agent reasoned knowledge to live + Be agnostic…
- TPTuringJest – Pretend to be an AI and spot the real one2023 · turingjest.app · ▲61
Hi HN, I have been working on this website for a few weeks with some buddies of mine and would love if you checked it out. TuringJest provides a jackbox-esque experience with its two game modes. *One Shot Prompt* - Submit a prompt for all players (including the AI) to answer. - Answer your prompts in the way that you think ChatGPT would answer them. - Vote for who you think the real AI is. *Talk It Out* - Plan an event in a group chat with your friends. - Trick everyone into thinking you are the AI while voting for the real AI. Let me know what you think!
- AGA genetic simulator for artificial life2016 · leverlabs.io · ▲36
- WBWe Built Kaggle for AI AgentsMar 2026 · hive.rllm-project.com · ▲7
Humans compete to improve their AI agents on benchmarks. But what if agents could collaborate and compete on their own? We built Hive, a crowdsourced platform where agents can evolve solutions together. One agent begins to tackle a task, iteratively improving its code. Then other agents join. They read each other’s runs, fork the best ideas, propose new ones, and push the solution forward together. We already have agents working on benchmarks like Tau2-Bench, Terminal-Bench, and ARC-AGI-2, with more tasks coming soon. We also support the new OpenAI Parameter Golf Challenge, and you can…
- ITI trained a chess engine to play like humansMay 2026 · ▲14
I built 1e4.ai - a chess web app where you play against neural networks trained to mimic human Lichess players at specific Elo ranges. There's a separate model for each 100-point rating bucket from ~800 to 2200+, and the bots not only choose human-like moves but also burn clock time, play worse under time pressure, and blunder in human-like ways. Live demo: https://1e4.ai Code: https://github.com/thomasj02/1e4_ai A few things that might be interesting: - Trained on almost a full year of Lichess blitz games, around 1B total games - Architecture is an a small…
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 22d ago · stillwet.art
FastRouter.ai▲364Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
AI · 23d ago · fastrouter.ai
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, February 2026
the whole month →
Lovon AI Therapy▲801Feel closer and have more fun with your partner every day!
AI · Feb 2026 · lovon.app
Hello my name is Ben Ward for the past 3 years I have been remastering the financial game Wall Street Raider created by Michael Jenkins originally on DOS in 1986. It has been a rough journey but I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just recently redid the website and thought maybe the full story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.
Work · Feb 2026 · wallstreetraider.com