Working Prototype · Not Canon

Eco 2.0, Running: The Self-Built Boundary

Mechanism B — the boundary fused to maintenance — and an honest ignition test

This is a prototype of the Eco 2.0 design. The fixed refuge of Eco 1.0 is gone. In its place, herbivores build their own protective wall by spending their own energy, and the wall decays unless they keep paying to hold it. The boundary is no longer handed in; it exists only where the life is actively maintaining it. The panel on the right runs an ignition test that reports, honestly, whether a real bootstrapping interval has opened — and it is built to be able to say no.

Speed 4 ticks/frame

Wall build cost 0.8

Wall decay rate 0.010

Perturbation strength 40%

empty grass herb pred wall (built)

tik	0
grass	0
herbivores	0
predators	0
wall cells	0
wall built this tik	0
wall decayed this tik	0

Ignition test: not igniting

What the ignition test is doing, and why it is allowed to fail. The memo governing this work forbids painting a bootstrapping interval onto an attractlet. So the test does not assume Eco 2.0 succeeded — it checks, every tik, for the structural signs of a real recursion lock built on a self-produced boundary: that the wall is being actively regenerated by the herbivores' own spending (not coasting), that a protected interior is feeding the population that maintains it, and that this has held stable across a span. Only if all criteria hold does it report a defined recurcline, and only then does it call an interval open. Until then it reports undefined — still an attractlet, which is the honest reading and the most likely one for an early prototype. A green result here is a claim of sovereignty, and inherits the full four-condition burden. Watch the wall: if it can outlive the herbivores that built it, it is still scaffolding.

The perturbation, and what to watch

Press Perturb to strike the herbivores. In Eco 1.0 the fixed refuge always caught the survivors. Here there is no fixed refuge — only the wall the herbivores are currently paying for. A shock that thins them enough may starve the wall of upkeep, so the boundary itself decays, exposing the interior, deepening the crash. Recovery, if it comes, means the survivors rebuilt their own boundary out of their own work. That — a boundary re-made by the life it protects — is what ignition would look like, and what the test is watching for.

← Back to the Eco 2.0 design