Program 04 · Hypercolony
A four-dimensional world
where civilizations emerge.
Hypercolony is a tessaractic ecosystem of 1024 embodied agents navigating a 4D substrate. Three competing clans — Lexicons, Phero-Mystics, Solar Nomads — pursue different cognitive strategies. Without hardcoded rules, they exhibit Ibn Khaldun's full civilizational cycle: Rise, Zenith, Luxury, Decline, Collapse.
Embodied cognition
Not simulated. Inhabited.
Most multi-agent systems are statistical games on flat grids. Hypercolony is a four-dimensional world with physics, terrain, food, light, and pheromones — and minds that have to find their place in it. Civilization is not scripted; it is what these agents do when left alone.
The substrate is a tessaractic grid — a 16×16×8×5 hypercube of cells with walls, food spawns, light gradients, and pheromone fields. Agents move through the fourth axis as naturally as the first three. Their bodies are simple. Their environment is not.
Three clan strategies compete for survival. Lexicons hunt knowledge — they consume curriculum food and grow topological memory graphs. Phero-Mystics follow collective pheromone trails laid by their kin. Solar Nomads photosynthesise from light fields and migrate with the seasons.
Each agent builds a personal topological memory — a graph of concepts and relations that grows from what it has touched, eaten, and survived. Memory is not weights. It is a small, inspectable knowledge structure unique to that agent.
Clans accumulate asabiyyah (cohesion), luxury, and prestige independently. With nothing telling them to, they pass through Ibn Khaldun's five-phase civilizational cycle: Rise, Zenith, Luxury, Decline, Collapse — and then a new clan rises. History, emerging from arithmetic.
Internal stack
Five layers, one ecosystem.
Hypercolony's architecture is a vertical stack from physics to history. The substrate hosts agents; agents form clans; clans accumulate cohesion; cohesion produces civilizations; civilizations rise and fall. Every layer feeds the next. Nothing is scripted.
Substrate by the numbers
A tessaract at scale.
Hypercolony is small enough to run on one machine and large enough to surprise its operators. These are the live numbers from the public reference deployment. Every value is reproducible from the codebase.
Live bridge
From substrate to screen.
The simulation is one process. The viewer is another. A WebSocket bridge keeps them in lockstep — every tick, the full world state crosses the wire and the renderer reconstructs it in 3D. You are not watching a recording. You are watching a world.
The Python core runs backend_engine.py at 20 ticks per second. On every tick it advances physics, agent decisions, pheromone diffusion, and clan accounting; then it serialises the entire world — agents, cells, exams, logs, colony speech — to JSON and broadcasts to all listening clients.
The browser side is React 19 + Three.js (R3F). A custom 4D-to-3D renderer projects the tessaractic grid into an isometric view; the HUD overlays clan stats, exam progress, and the colony's emergent dialogue. You can pause the simulation, single-step it, or inject anomalies and see how the colony responds.
You can also talk to the colony. Plain-text queries are answered from the agents' own topological memory and the curriculum corpus they have eaten. There is no external LLM in the loop; the response is composed locally from semantic vectors and the colony's accumulated knowledge graph.
Watch a world find itself.
Hypercolony is running now. The substrate is live, the agents are moving, the pheromones are diffusing, and a clan is somewhere on its way to zenith. Open the viewer, pause the world, and see where the cycle is right now.