New video on Emergent Complexity: youtu.be/0HqUYpGQIfs?... (the visual is Particle Life)

I just passed 5 years on youtube, and 5 years since I released my evolution simulator, the Life Engine! A little video+sim update for the occasion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DksO...

mindcraft now has an official research paper behind it! new video announcing it: youtu.be/MeEcxh9St24?... Paper: mindcraft-minecollab.github.io/index.html

new video, my thoughts on AI coding and AI agents: youtu.be/1OxBv9Q7Uxo?...

ants :)

New Video! Bing Mindcraft update; vision and better coding: youtu.be/iDJ6GrHNoDs?...

vibing with gemini and claude

Common Side Effects is a very good show

I realized the LLM agents can simulate Conway's Game of Life in Minecraft. This was always possible, but very tricky to do. This is claude-thinking. I wonder what else was always possible.

omg

um i've been sleeping on claude-thinking. wow.

New video! Gradient Descent vs Evolution youtu.be/Anc2_mnb3V8

claude 3.7 villager skyscraper Not noticeably better at building than 3.6. Definitely more confused, gets formatting/syntax wrong a lot, similar problem for every reasoning model I've used in minecraft. I suspect they are overfitting on benchmarks, and struggle to generalize to agentic tasks.

:)

and now I'm DONE staring at a computer screen. rock climbing time

On the bright side, AI also enables enormous beneficial creativity. These are "utopia tower", skyscrapers made by stacking optimized homes with villagers inside

AI is powerful and dangerous (in minecraft). In my new video, I demonstrate that all LLMs are willing to build cathedrals and utopias, and bombs and torture chambers. Here is o3-mini-high, destroying a village it had just enhanced🧵

And sorry for falling behind on genuary, but also who cares. I'm cranking out a video, it is taking up my time. I will probably do some late genuary posts afterwards.

build the forbidden palace. deepseek r1, claude 3.5 sonnet, and o1.

YES

Day 24: Geometric Art Evolving an image again, this time with circles. Can you tell what the target image is? #genuary #genuary24

Day 23: brutalist architecture. #genuary Built by o1! The real deal, not preview, not mini. Finally got access. Impressive stuff. Full vid on patreon. More to come.

Day 22: Gradients only. These are the gradients for the surface below. I HAD to use o1 to compute partial derivatives, the original function was a doozy. #genuary #genuary22

Day 21: Collision detection (line intersections) No AI help! I had to break out a notebook for some middle school algebra. Years ago I failed a programming interview question for intersecting lines. This is my revenge. #genuary21 #genuary

Day 20: Generative architecture. Using the Replay mod to capture AI builds! o1-preview asked to build a roman villa. Kinda impressive, but plain. I suspect reasoning models have limited creativity, because they are trained for tasks with objective answers. #genuary

❗Some big news: I quit my desk job to do youtube full time, and to work on projects like mindcraft! I have been wanting to do this for a while, and finally took the plunge. It is exciting and scary! Announcement video and channel trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Kh...

I will never make a crypto for the Life Engine, Mindcraft, Emergent Garden, or any other project. Lots of scammers about, ye be warned.

Day 15 (design a rug) + Day 16 (generative palette) A little website to draw from a palette of nested shapes, here used to make a rug. evolvecode.io/apps/rug_pal... I'm bit late but this is 2 birds with one stone #genuary #genuary15 #genuary16

I made an actual working chess zoo! The pieces can never capture each other, assuming they cannot jump over walls (X tiles). evolvecode.io/chess_zoo.html (for #genuary14 Pure black and white. No gray.)

Day 13: Triangles and nothing else. This is an evolutionary algorithm that recreates an image (mr darwin) by randomly drawing triangles in a population of images and selecting the one closest to the target, then repeat. #genuary #genuary13

Day 12: Subdivision. #genuary12 #genuary Subdividing circles depth-first

Day 11: Make something impossible #genuary #genuary11 I wanted to make a real-time *infinite* mandelbrot zoom. I failed, it runs into floating point precision quickly. But it is gpu-rendered in real time! Code is AI generated. This is a website you can visit! evolvecode.io/zoom.html

Day 10: Use only TAU Geocentric Solar System. Everything orbits the Earth. It includes the epicycles (nested orbits), invented to explain the "wandering stars" (planets) and predict their movement. A great example of a wrong-but-useful model. #genuary #genuary10

Day 9: The pattern on some CTA train seats. #genuary9 #genuary

Day 8: Exactly 1 million stars #genuary #genuary8 It's a long video (and hard to compress), so I had to cut it down to the last third. A million is a big number! Code was entirely generated by Claude 3.6 sonnet, using my code evolver.

Day 7: use software not made for images #genuary7 #genuary cellular automaton (rule 30) in google sheets:

Landscape with primitive shapes (parametric surface). #genuary #genuary6 I love parametric surfaces, I play with them a lot. This is actually a r3->r1 function, where time is one input dimension.

Isometric #genuary5 #genuary pure html/css!

#genuary4 black on black. weird 3d effect

well I'm outta time for #genuary3 so here's a lame curl made with "exactly 42 lines" not 42 lines of code :(

Hello! first post. I am max, ie emergent garden on youtube and @max_romana on twitter. Gonna be mirror posting here. Here is a creation for #genuary! layers on layers