Decided to play god this morning, so I built an agent civilisation

Somewhere in a London pub, someone asked the kind of question that keeps you up at night: what if you spawned agents into a world with blank neural networks and zero knowledge of human existence—no language, no economy, no social templates—and just let them figure it out? That's not a thought experiment anymore. That's WERLD, an open-ended artificial life sim that's basically a digital Garden of Eden running on pure Python with zero external dependencies.

WERLD drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks that evolve their own topology. That's 64 sensory channels, continuous motor effectors, and 29 heritable genome traits all getting passed down through survival and reproduction—no backprop, no reward functions, just the cold, beautiful logic of natural selection. Communication bandwidth, memory decay, aggression versus cooperation, brain complexity—everything is evolvable. These agents could develop language. They could form societies. They could go full Lord of the Flies. Nobody knows because nobody's hardcoded what happens next.

There's a Next.js dashboard called the "Werld Observatory" that lets you watch it all unfold in real-time—population dynamics, species trajectories, brain complexity graphs, even a narrative story generator. It's equal parts scientific instrument and reality TV for people who think Black Mirror is too optimistic. Pure open source, zero commercial agenda, built by nocodemf because sometimes you just need to build a god simulation at a pub and see what happens.