Experiments

Archive Organization

Every claim in this book is either tested, testable, or honestly labeled as speculative. This appendix catalogs the experimental program as a research archive: 43 canonical study records spanning LLM, MARL, Lenia CA, protocell agency, the measurement program, and a cross-substrate convergence test. The point is not to present a trophy wall of positive results. The point is to show the dependency structure: which claims survived, which failed, which were retracted, and which architectural walls forced the next experiment.

Archive Organization

The experiment codebase is now organized around the distinction this appendix needs: study records versus implementation packages. A study is the canonical scientific unit — title, status, seeds, result location, and key finding. A package is runnable code that several studies may share.

Canonical index: experiments/registry.json

Read each section as an experiment in an evolving chain, not as an isolated result. ask what a cellular automaton can do without agency. asks what changes once action-observation loops exist. isolate the decomposability problem in prediction architecture. test whether social targets, direct selection, contrastive losses, or communication solve it. Most do not. The nulls are load-bearing.