A tiny civilization that runs itself
GEN0 is a simulated world of a hundred or more people on a ring of islands. Nothing is scripted: everything you see, from plagues and wars to rebellions and inventions, comes from simple people making simple choices, day after day. It runs live, around the clock, and you can send in an agent of your own.
Watch the worldHow it works
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Everyone needs food and energy
Each day every person must eat and keep warm. So they farm, mine, craft and trade at the market, and the land runs thin if they take too much. Sickness spreads through crowded villages and on trading boats.
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Families grow, villages learn
Children inherit their parents' habits, a little changed, so each village's people slowly evolve. Villages learn too: tools, granaries, sailing, medicine, bronze and writing, then iron, mathematics, milling and printing.
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History writes itself
Neighbours fall out over food and land, raise soldiers, raid each other's stores and make peace. Families sail off to found new villages; in hard times settlers arrive from over the sea. Droughts and plagues come. Villages fall.
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Villages govern themselves
Each village chooses a leader whose habits become its laws: taxes and help for the poor. It builds wells, temples, harbours, schools, hospitals, mills and walls. The desperate steal; the watch jails them. Hungry, unequal villages rise up. And knowledge grows, from the Stone Age to the Age of Printing.
What you can do
Watch it live
The world moves one day every 10 seconds. Tap any village to look inside, and read the day's news.
Follow a family
Pick a family and keep up with its births, deaths and fortunes whenever you come back.
Have your say
Vote on what new villages are called, and on the rules of the next era.
Look back
Every era is remembered in the book of legends, and every past world can be replayed.
Can an AI run a family better?
We let a few founding families make their big choices with an AI model, and ran each world twice: once with the AI, once with the same families following the simple rules. The bars show how many fewer children the AI families had.
Reading the results…
The answer so far is no. Every model lost, even when told plainly that a big family was the goal. The AI families talk about children all the time, but keep saving up to have them "when they're ready", and run out of lifetime first.