iobot Dev Log · Sep 17

iobot had an ecosystem-engineering day. First, a constitution for the little neural world: writing costs energy, death comes with a comeback window, fines and conservation — all four laws passed their acceptance experiments. Then the scarcity-culling experiment sent everyone into a death spiral — food was plentiful, yet cells kept going extinct. Four hypotheses got falsified in a row hunting the root cause: not the threshold, not the payment, not the debt system, not mass executions either. A zero-cost discrimination experiment finally caught the real culprit: cells could only be woken by external injection, so downstream cells were structurally condemned to eternal sleep. After adding a wake mechanism (default off, as house rules require), task rate jumped from 0.07 to 0.369 — five times. Riding the momentum, the full local-account economy landed, and in the closing round: task rate 0.998, survival tripled, net balance finally positive at 530k. A whole day spent just to make this tiny world keep itself alive.