One world, era by era
The first six are rare worlds picked out of 300; the rest are worlds 1 to 36 as they come. Ages are years since the Big Bang.
How far 200 worlds get
The highest rung each of worlds 1 to 200 reaches, in ladder order. Grey rungs are where a world stops before life; green from replicators on.
Most worlds stop early: no temperate planet (50), a clump too small to become a star (25), or cells that never become complex (39). Language with grammar appears in 3 of 200, a state in 1.
What was corrected
First minutes
One universe instead of a different one per world: 75.3 % hydrogen, 24.7 % helium, the measured values. Photon heating and the neutron lifetime now set when helium forms.
Stars
"3 % of hydrogen per generation" is gone. Stars now have masses, lifetimes and fates: white dwarfs, supernovae and the elements each returns.
Planets
The temperate zone and the surface temperature are one rule, so "no water" no longer comes from two rules disagreeing. Giants can migrate, mergers conserve angular momentum.
Chemistry
Bond strengths from bond enthalpies, lightning as an energy source, and organic means a carbon–hydrogen bond.
Replicators
No more perpetual motion: spent building blocks, hydrolysis of every bond, copy time grows with length.
The clock
One time axis in years. The star's lifetime ends the world, so a short-lived star leaves no time for evolution.
The worlds of round 6, which the version-5 models were trained on, stay unchanged; the corrections are a switch, checked by 56 frozen tests.
What is still a toy
- The top of the ladder is partly picked. Levels from replicators to society are tried up to six times per planet, and the first try that climbs is kept. World 85 reached its state on the sixth society try.
- Language does not yet decide who survives. The words and grammar are learned culture, but being understood does not change survival or births, and the meanings come from a fixed list, not from what the organisms sense.
- The stages of language follow a clock. Calls, words and grammar start at fixed steps; only whether each succeeds varies.
- The biological durations are invented rates. The order of the rungs follows evolution; how long each takes is one planet's pace used for all.
- The highest worlds orbit red dwarfs because their stars live a trillion years, which leaves room for six tries. Flares and planets that always face their star are not modelled.
- The rare rungs are too rare to teach well: 3 languages and 1 state in 200 worlds.
These points come from an independent review of round 7. They are the next round's work: one population carried up the ladder, grouping and communication paid for in fitness, meanings grounded in the senses, and one continued history instead of best of six.
Training
A model of 33 million parameters was trained on these worlds alone (720,000 lines, 105,000 steps on one RTX 4090): lessons whose answer follows from the question (80 % of the tokens) and the stories of 256 worlds (20 %). Questions it never saw:
Rules: 39 %
Best where the answer is short or a decision: chemistry 63 %, the chain's hand-offs 65 %, replicators 55 %, language 52 %. Weakest where it must do multi-digit arithmetic with powers and roots: gravity 16 %, first minutes 17 %, society 23 %.
Stories: not memorised
On the worlds it was trained on it gets 29 % right, about what it guesses for worlds it never saw (32 %). It did not learn the 256 languages: 0 of 15 sentences said right, 27 of 107 meanings.
The loss was still falling when training stopped (0.88 to 0.50), so a longer run should help. Development and sealed scores agree (39.7 % and 39.4 %), so the rules it learned hold on new inputs.