Method

VAEL is an artificial-life world that runs 24 hours a day on a small home server. The creatures have a genome (body and brain), senses, a body with physics, and a few verbs: move, eat, sleep, sing, pick up and drop, bite, give.

What we don't do

• No behaviour is hand-written: what to do with the body is decided by a neural brain that evolves.
• No language model ever enters the simulation or edits genomes.
• What you see on the stream and on these pages is read from the real state: emotions, words, nests.

What we measure

• Meaning of calls: mutual information between the note sung and what is nearby (food, Shade, fruit), with Miller-Madow bias correction.
• Dialects: mutual information between a creature's usual call and its region of the world.
• Diversity: mean distance between bodies; species by a distance threshold from a representative.
• Interventions: lights switched on by the audience are logged (time and parameters) and are part of the experiment.

Reproducibility

The simulation is deterministic: the same seed and the same intervention log give the same history. Seed of this world: 20261112.

Limits

A small world of a few hundred individuals; statistical associations, not intentions; grouping into species is our convention.