Stars burn fast and waste most of what they make. Life is what grew to catch the scraps. This page asks a simple question: if we want an artificial mind, should we copy the conditions that produced life, instead of handing it a goal?
One honest note first: these are small toy worlds. They test an idea. They do not prove anything about Earth.
Think of water falling down a staircase of pools. Each pool catches some and lets the rest spill over. What spills past the last pool is gone into the dark. Move the slider to add more mills that catch the spill.
Illustration, not a simulation: it shows only the idea of capture. Each pool catches the same share of what reaches it.
This pond runs the real model from our research code. Creatures eat the glowing grass. They also find small wells and big wells, which stay shut unless creatures spend energy to hold them open. Wasted energy rises away as embers. Nobody is told what to want: creatures that gather enough energy have children, those that starve disappear, and children inherit their parent's instincts with small random changes. Press Very fast and watch.
Wasted means it grew or leaked away without anyone using it.
Each run is one random example. Another pond can go very differently, which is why the next section uses 30 ponds per setting rather than a picture.
We wrote down our predictions before running anything, then ran 30 ponds for each setting. Here is the plain-language version. Full numbers and caveats are in the repository.
Creatures selected only by surviving and having children scored about 9% higher on our energy-use measure than creatures whose parents were chosen at random. A real but small effect.
A forager we programmed by hand gets about half its energy from the big wells, and it finds them in every one of 30 ponds. Evolved creatures got about 2% of their energy there. So most of the available leftover energy went unused.
We predicted that scarce food, inheritance, and the real cost of dying would each be needed to reach the big wells. The opposite happened. Removing any of them made it easier to find them. Try it below.
Each dot is one of 30 ponds. A lit dot means a creature opened a big well at least once. Real results, not a simulation.
Caution: "opened at least once" is a generous test. It does not mean the creatures kept using the big wells. With everything switched on, they get only a few percent of their energy from them.
We guessed that opening a well is a favour to everyone nearby, so selection punishes the creature that pays for it. We tested that by letting the opener keep most of the reward. It moved in the predicted direction, but not by enough to be sure it was real at 30 ponds.