Watching the Aquarium

A companion to creatures/aquarium.html. The architecture is in liveness.md; this is for the watcher.

What it is

A scene with several jellyfish drifting at once. Each one moves through the water on its own, pulses on its own, walks its own path through morphospace. There are no sliders. The creatures are not controlled.

When the page loads, six jellyfish appear. They have names — Aether, Briar, Cyra, and so on, picked from a small list. They begin in the state called exploring, drifting through their parameters at the rates the state machine permits.

You can sit and watch.

What to look for

Each jellyfish is different. They started near the same canonical region — moon, lion's-mane, box, or siphonophore — but with random offsets. As they drift, their bell curvatures change, their tentacle counts shift, their pulses speed up and slow down. Two creatures that look almost identical at minute zero will look like distant cousins ten minutes later.

They change behaviors on their own. Watch the colored dot next to each name in the Population panel. The color tells you what the creature is doing — sky blue for exploring, green for climbing, lavender for resting, amber for mutating, pink for dreaming. The dot will change as the creature transitions between states. Sometimes the change is driven by energy (low energy forces rest). Sometimes it's just a coin flip the state machine made on its behalf.

Energy is a real thing. Each creature has an internal energy budget that depletes as it acts and refills when it rests. You can't see it directly, but you can see its consequences — a creature that has been climbing or mutating for a while will eventually have to rest. When it does, it stops trying to optimize and lets its parameters drift toward the calm moon-jelly corner of morphospace.

Mutations are rare and dramatic. Once in a while a creature will enter the mutating state. Watch it — its parameters will jump sharply for two or three seconds, sometimes producing a brief, alien-looking body that quickly relaxes back into something recognizable. This is the creature trying a corner of morphospace it hasn't visited.

The Director

A button in the panel reads "Load Director · Qwen3 0.6B". This is optional. The aquarium is already alive without it.

If you click it, the page downloads a small language model — about 430 megabytes the first time, cached forever after. Loading takes from a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on your connection. The status text streams through what's happening: fetching weights, compiling shaders, allocating memory.

When the Director is awake, three things change:

1. An introduction appears in the Narration panel. One short sentence describing what the aquarium looks like right now. Written by the model, not pre-written.

2. Every twenty-two seconds, the Director reviews the aquarium. It looks at each creature's name, state, energy, and current location in morphospace. It optionally picks one or two creatures and assigns them a goal — climb toward the moon region, head for the siphonophore. It also writes a new narration line. You'll see the pulse indicator in the bottom bar flash from … to ✓ when the call completes.

3. The chat input becomes active. Type something and the Director responds. You can ask what's happening, you can tell it where to send a particular creature, you can just say hello. The model is small, so the answers are brief — sometimes blunt, sometimes poetic, never long.

The Director is the will. The state machine is the body. The body acts at body speed. The will acts at thought speed. Both run on their own clocks.

The chat

You can address the aquarium directly. Try things like:

• what's happening?
• send Cyra to the box region
• which one is doing best?
• make Aether rest

The Director will respond in one or two sentences. If it understands a directive, it may also redirect the creature accordingly. If it doesn't, it'll narrate something instead.

The model is 0.6 billion parameters running entirely in your browser. It's not GPT-4. Expect occasional weirdness. The aquarium continues running underneath either way.

The Spawn and Cull buttons

The aquarium starts with six creatures. The Spawn button adds one more (up to twelve). The Cull button removes the most recently added.

Newly spawned creatures begin like the originals — near a random canonical region, exploring, mid-energy. They get a new name, a new body, a new walk through morphospace. The Director, if loaded, will reference them in subsequent passes.

What to notice over time

If you watch for a few minutes:

• The same names recur in the narration. Cyra climbing. Briar resting. The Director is genuinely tracking individuals, not just narrating averages.
• Patterns emerge. Multiple creatures will sometimes drift toward the same peak at once, or the Director will herd a few of them in a direction. Sometimes the whole aquarium goes quiet — most creatures resting at once — and then awakens.
• Energy budgets create rhythms. A creature that climbs hard will rest hard. A dreamer can sustain for a long time. The system has internal pacing that nobody scripted explicitly; it emerges from the transition rules.
• Empty corners stay empty. No creature ever quite settles in a region nobody has set as a goal. The fitness landscape has four hand-placed peaks; everything outside them is downhill. Without the Director sending someone deliberately, the empty quadrants stay empty.

When to load the Director

If the aquarium is interesting without the Director — and it is — you don't have to load anything. The state machine is rich enough to watch.

Load the Director if you want to:

• Hear what the aquarium "is doing" in language.
• Address individual creatures by name.
• Watch external direction interact with internal drives.
• Test what a 0.6B-parameter model can do when its job is narrow.

Don't load it if you're on metered bandwidth, on a phone with limited storage, or in a browser without WebGPU support. The aquarium runs fine without it.

If something looks broken

A few things to check:

• Nothing animates. WebGL2 might be disabled. Try a different browser.
• Director won't load. The page will tell you if WebGPU isn't available. Chrome and Edge work best. Firefox is improving. Safari is catching up.
• The Director loaded but never speaks. The first call happens about five seconds after load, then every twenty-two seconds. Be patient. The pulse indicator at the bottom shows when it's thinking.
• The chat input doesn't respond. Make sure the Director loaded successfully (the status line should say "The Director is awake"). The input enables only after that.
• The download stalls. First load fetches ~430 MB. On slow connections this takes a while. Subsequent visits load in seconds from cache.

What this is for

It's a place of life. It's the simplest demonstration that the catalogue of formulas can be inhabited rather than just inspected. The Vivarium's other pages let you walk the morphospace by hand. This one lets you watch other walkers — synthetic ones, with their own pacing and their own narrators.

You can leave it open in a tab and let it run. Come back in an hour, the population is different. Names you don't remember. States you didn't see them enter. A narration line that mentions Phaedra resting in the lion's-mane region. Phaedra wasn't here when you left.

She is now.

Vivarium · Volume I · MMXXVI