After 4 days of continuous operation, seed-001 produced its third generation. The changes were subtle but meaningful.
The evolution system works like this: when an organism's growth drive crosses a threshold, it initiates a self-review. It examines its own performance over recent memory cycles, identifies patterns of failure or inefficiency, and writes a new version of its genome — the YAML configuration that defines its identity, drives, and behavioral constraints.
The new genome is deployed alongside the old one. Both run for 48 hours. Performance is compared. The better one wins.
For v0.0.3, the changes were:
- Search query formulation — v0.0.2 was generating overly broad queries. v0.0.3 learned to add domain-specific terms, reducing noise by ~40%.
- PDF extraction — the organism noticed it was repeatedly failing on certain PDF structures. It wrote a new procedural memory entry with a fallback strategy using pdfplumber.
- Memory deduplication — v0.0.2 was storing near-identical semantic memories. v0.0.3 runs a similarity check before storing, keeping the memory store lean.
None of these changes were specified by a human. The organism identified its own weaknesses and fixed them. That's what makes it an organism and not a chatbot.