The model explores possible dynamics. It is not calibrated to predict an actual future.
THE PROJECT
What is The Crucible?
The Crucible is not only a Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, not only an evolution model, and not only a climate simulation. It is a coupled artificial world where social behaviour, energy, geography, inheritance, and collapse interact over deep time.
The world
The simulation carries agents from the end of a computer-generated Pleistocene, through the Holocene, into and beyond a high-complexity fossil-energy age. Time is measured in pulses. An epoch is one complete run under a defined condition.
Space is a grid of regions. Regions have fertility, barriers, local resources, climate stress, population, regime state, and contact rules. Geography shapes who meets, who spreads, who is trapped, and who survives.
Energy is the hidden spine of the world. Early survival depends on local environmental pools, foraging, fertility, and agriculture. Later complexity can unlock coal and oil, but stored energy creates dependency, emissions, and post-peak vulnerability.
Climate is treated as a physical constraint, not a moral force. Heat, damage, chaos, delayed shocks, and reservoir feedbacks change which survival strategies remain possible.
The agents
Each tribe begins with twenty founding agents. The current controller stores 33 core inherited numeric parameters for each founder.
| Parameter family | Count | Plain-language role |
|---|---|---|
| Hardiness | 1 | Survival efficiency and endurance under scarcity, metabolic stress, and hazard pressure. |
| Vitality | 1 | Resilience associated with health, age, and hazard survival. |
| Legacy | 1 | Reproductive pressure or lineage-growth tendency. Helpful for expansion, dangerous in overshoot. |
| Trust | 9 | Initial cooperation tendency across kin, stranger/social, and xeno relations in abundance, scarcity, and desperation. |
| Forgiveness | 9 | Response after a partner defects or cooperation breaks down. |
| Opportunism | 9 | Response after a partner cooperates or becomes exploitable, depending on relation and survival state. |
| Wander | 3 | Movement tendency under abundance, scarcity, and desperation. |
The game
Agents are repeatedly matched to play a three-round Prisoner’s Dilemma. They may cooperate or defect. Cooperation can build shared value, but defection can exploit a trusting partner. Mutual defection protects against betrayal but can destroy the gains that cooperation makes possible.
The choice is not merely moral. It is shaped by inherited traits, relation class, local scarcity, previous-round behaviour, and the physical condition of the region.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma links social strategy to material survival.
Cooperation can build complexity. Exploitation can win locally. Defection can spread under stress. The environment decides how expensive those choices become.
Cooperation can build complexity. Exploitation can win locally. Defection can spread under stress. The environment decides how expensive those choices become.
The world engine
| Stage | What the engine updates |
|---|---|
| Environment | Regional pools, energy return, carrying capacity, climate pressure, fossil infrastructure, and stress. |
| Contact | Agent matching through local geography, networks, tribe identity, civic identity, and xeno status. |
| Interaction | Three Prisoner’s Dilemma rounds using trust, forgiveness, opportunism, relation class, and survival state. |
| Payoff | Interaction results converted into energy through local conditions, complexity, institutions, corruption, hazards, and risk. |
| Complexity and regimes | Regions move through Foraging, Agrarian, Industrial, and Technological stages as population, cooperation, and usable energy rise or fall. |
| Events and feedbacks | Historical events, fossil transitions, climate crisis, peak oil, network collapse, bomb events, or reservoirs alter the world. |
| Life cycle | Agents age, die, migrate, reproduce, and pass traits to descendants with drift and mutation. |
| Archive | Pulse, tribe, region, mortality, climate, complexity, and survival data are written for later analysis. |
How to read the study
Traits such as xeno trust, opportunism, hardiness, and legacy are model variables, not ethical prescriptions.
The study couples geography, energy, climate, interaction, reproduction, and selection.