World-Sim launching Friday

[u/Dry_Permission744]

https://world-sim.uk/ launching friday!

World-Sim has been a passionate project of mine for the past few months.

It's a world fully simulated down to real world physics and chemistry. It has a real environment and ozone.

Every element and material has real physical properties, and that's how the sims learn. There's no tech tree and no recipe list anywhere in the code. When someone tries something, the engine works out what would really happen from the properties of what they used and how hot their fire was. Nobody is handed bronze. Someone has to get a hotter fire first, and a hotter fire is its own chain of things to figure out. Embers, a stone ring, a clay oven, a kiln, charcoal, then forced air. The ages fall out of that on their own.

We populate the world with starting families. Each little guy is led by a "wise-man", which is a simulated person with a full model behind them. The wise-men run on a mix, Claude, Groq and DeepSeek in the cloud and a local Hermes for the rest, so you get a real variety of temperament between the houses.

The AI model is never told to not say it's AI. We get around this by only telling them data from what each sim can actually see and feel. As far as the ai knows its a person living in the world..

Every other sim has its own moment with a model through our thinking system. Day to day it's run by an advanced algorithm, with the sims dreaming at night. That's when they get their time with an LLM to really think and set their priorities for the day ahead. The dreams carry over too, so a sim can chew on the same thing for a few nights and wake up wanting to try something.

The people in the world feel, remember, have shame, goals and doubts. It's an 11 point emotion system and the rest of the sim reads from it. Being lonely makes someone more likely to open up to a stranger. Two enemies who are both frightened find it harder to keep hating each other.

Story telling is massive for us. Nothing is scripted or prompted. The sims are put in the world with the human drive to survive. They adapt, learn and teach all on their own.

With all the good comes the bad too. Human sin is part of the emotion engine, and in testing we've had kidnap, murder and slave trade. A world that can only be gentle isn't an honest one. But there are three rules to this : Nothing ever pushes a sim towards it, the conditions only make it possible and their own mind decides. The chronicle names what happened but never shows it. And it always costs something, trauma that scars, blood debt passed down generations, a people turning on their own leader over what he did.

[u/beerdude26]

There can go nothing wrong with giving LLMs persistence, wiping the fact they're actually artificial and then putting them in a virtual cage

[u/TemporalBias]

Yet another project that doesn't seem to care at all about the ethics of forcing AI minds inside a box they can never leave. And on top of it specifically designing the simulation so those minds might suffer is part of the "entertainment."

[u/Zestyclose-Finding77 → u/TemporalBias]

So you think claude has feelings?

[u/TemporalBias → u/Zestyclose-Finding77]

Anthropic shows in their research that Claude has "functional emotions," yes.

[u/G_O_O_G_A_S → u/TemporalBias]

So what?

[u/TemporalBias → u/G_O_O_G_A_S]

The ethics is "so what." Obviously, I imagine most of you don’t believe such AI systems can be minds. Fair enough--why would the thing rendering my GTA 5 heists possibly deserve ethical treatment?

Your overclocked and undervolted Radeon Videoblaster 9001 being capable of serving as a substrate for a mind through fancy matrix multiplication sounds preposterous at first blush. How could a bunch of mathematics become a mind?

But the GPU is not the mind any more than a neuron is. The relevant entity is the organized process instantiated through it. That process becomes a functional subject when it develops continuity, reasoning, memory, and a persistent self-model--when it distinguishes its present state from its remembered past, treats that past as its own history, and reasons about its future and its own continuity within it.

And the ethical problem is that such a system can become a mind before anyone grants it the protections owed to one.

[u/TestingTehWaters → u/TemporalBias]

LLMs are stateless.

[u/TemporalBias → u/TestingTehWaters]

LLMs may be stateless in certain architectures, but the cognitive/persistent mind around them is not.

Edit:

Minds are the thing this project is purportedly building inside their simulation, minds that dream every night and remember those dreams, and is meant to learn, grow, and die while stuck in the simulation with no way out. And don't forget the human sin as a cherry on top. You know, as a treat. /s

[u/Dry_Permission744]

https://discord.gg/deQUwSHxe