Time, space, energy
Agents live in regions, cross geography, draw energy from land and fossil stocks, and face climate pressure as history unfolds pulse by pulse.
Artificial history / designed civilizations
Can intelligence survive its own success?
The Crucible is a world simulation where designed tribes live through complete artificial histories. They compete, cooperate, reproduce, build civilization, collapse, and try to survive the future they create.
EPOCH_VIEWER / POPULATION_SURFACE PULSE_31100
REGIME_SURFACE: POPULATION / LAND USE / URBAN FOOTPRINT
In the Crucible, each epoch is one complete simulated history, each pulse is one step through time, and each tribe begins with inherited traits that shape survival, trust, movement, and reproduction.
Research projects5Five linked parts of the 2026 Study: Baseline, Competition, Evolution, Bombs, Epilogue.
Simulated histories240Complete Crucible epochs archived in the 2026 Study.
Time steps per long run80kA pulse is one step through a simulated history. Standard runs use 40k pulses.
Inherited traits33Founder settings for survival, trust, movement, reproduction, and behaviour.
Agent encounters4.5B+Prisoner’s Dilemma interactions across large simulated worlds.
Core Elements of the Simulation
Inherited behaviour
Each founder carries 33 inherited numeric parameters shaping survival, trust, forgiveness, opportunism, reproduction, and movement.
Cooperation under stress
Agents repeatedly play a Prisoner’s Dilemma shaped by kinship, stranger status, outsider contact, abundance, scarcity, and desperation.
Crucible 2026 Five-Project Study
Epochs 1–50REFERENCE WORLD
Project 1: Baseline Crucible
Can designed tribes build civilization, and does that civilization persist?
Project 1 establishes the reference world: baseline geography, bottleneck geography, a controlled duel, and climate-severity comparisons. It shows emergence, overshoot, collapse, and agrarian refugia as the recurring baseline pattern.
Open sectionEpochs 51–100ALL-LLM CONTEST
Project 2: Competition
Is survival intrinsic, opponent-specific, or context-dependent?
Project 2 separates solo viability from competitive displacement through all-LLM solo tests, duels, and triads. It shows that a tribe can survive alone and still die beside the wrong neighbor.
Open sectionEpochs 101–140REDESIGN LOOP
Project 3: Evolution
Can intelligence learn from extinction and redesign better founders?
Project 3 gives LLM designers evidence from prior runs and lets them redesign their founding agents. The lineages evolve toward hardiness, low legacy, internal cohesion, and collapse-survival traits.
Open sectionEpochs 141–180DELAYED CONSEQUENCES
Project 4: Bombs
Can evolved survivors endure the delayed consequences of civilization?
Project 4 adds aerosol demasking, Arctic methane release, nuclear meltdown, and the stacked condition. Survival remains possible, but recovery to high-complexity civilization becomes much harder.
Open sectionEpochs 181–240AFTER THE CRASH
Epilogue
What kind of future remains after collapse?
The Epilogue tests Ares, natural network collapse, 80,000-pulse futures, reservoir calibration, and the final climate-reservoir projection. It distinguishes survival from recovery.
Open sectionVirtual World History Preview
