About

Primordial is a Darwinian artificial-life simulation. Each organism carries a genome — five physical traits (speed, size, vision, energy efficiency, reproduction rate) under a shared budget, plus a small neural network — that it passes to offspring with mutation. Nothing is scripted: who eats, survives and breeds is decided by energy, age and the environment, and the trait distribution drifts over generations as a result.

There is no fitness function

Nothing scores an organism and breeds the winners. One that gathers enough energy crosses a reproduction threshold and spawns a mutated child; one that runs out of energy or reaches its lifespan dies. “Fitness” is just whatever happens to survive long enough to reproduce — an observation, never an input. Take the scoring away and the ecology has to balance on its own, which is the whole point.

What is and isn't evolved

In the spirit of honesty about the mechanics: prey foraging is driven by the evolved neural brain, but predator hunting is a fixed pursuit heuristic — what evolution tunes there are the physical traits that decide a chase (speed, vision, size). The predator–prey cycle itself is fully emergent from population densities.

Extinction is allowed

By default, anti-extinction floors keep both species ever-present so the ecosystem settles into a sustained limit cycle. Enable allow extinction in the LAB panel to remove those floors — then selection pressure can actually wipe a population out, the most basic Darwinian outcome.

It's deterministic

Fix the seed in the LAB panel and the entire run replays bit-for-bit — not just the statistics, the whole world. Every random draw flows through one seeded stream, so the same seed always yields the same history. Leave the seed on AUTO for a fresh world each time.