Complexity
The research question of VAEL is simple to ask and hard to answer: left alone, how far does an evolving world climb? This page is the ladder we use. Every step has a measure taken from the world's own data, a threshold fixed in advance, and a note on what the measure does not prove.
steps reached1 of 7
living creatures118
generations15
| Step | Question | What we measure | Now | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reflex | Do the creatures respond to the world well enough to stay alive and reproduce? | generations since the beginning | 15 | reached |
| Reached at 10 generations. It shows that behaviour is good enough to survive, not that anything is understood. | ||||
| Signals that carry information | Does a call say something about what is happening (food, danger, an invitation)? | information shared between a call and its situation, in bits (best of three, last readings) | 0.000 | not yet |
| Reached at 0.05 bits. A call can be informative without anyone intending to inform. | ||||
| Learning within one life | Does a creature change what it does because of what happened to it, not only because of its genes? | share of living creatures holding a learned link between a call and food or harm; mean change of the plastic connections in the growing brain | 0% · 0.000 | not yet |
| Reached when one creature in five holds a learned link. What is learned dies with the creature: only the ability to learn is inherited. | ||||
| Culture | Do habits pass between creatures that are not parent and child, and do groups differ because of it? | creatures singing a song copied from another; information in the dialects (bits); places with a name | 0 · 0.344 · 0 | not yet |
| Reached when one creature in ten sings a copied song and either dialects carry information or a place has a name. Copying is not the same as teaching. | ||||
| A food web of its own | Without anyone adding predators, do some creatures come to live on others? | share of living creatures that are mostly meat eaters · share that eat both | 0% · 20% | not yet |
| Reached when one creature in twenty lives mostly on meat. Many meat eaters feed on carcasses rather than hunt. | ||||
| Brains that grow | Given the freedom to add neurons at a cost, does evolution use it? | share of creatures with extra neurons · largest number of extra neurons in one brain | 27% · 2 | not yet |
| Reached when a quarter of the creatures carry extra neurons and one brain has at least eight. A bigger brain is not a smarter one: it only costs more. | ||||
| Symbols | Does a call stand for something that is not there, such as a place or a creature out of sight? | not measured yet | — | not measured |
| We do not have an honest measure for this. It stays on the list as the open question of the project. | ||||
The thresholds are conventions, written down before looking at the results so that they cannot be bent afterwards. A step can be lost again: the page is rewritten every hour from the living world. Nothing here is steered: no language model touches the simulation or the genomes.