The Library & the Path

What this is. A small, self-contained exploration of emergence. We toggle simple laws (e.g., gravity-stable, chemistry-stable, communication-stable, population-dynamics) and watch which features appear—stars, galaxies, carbon chemistry, life, mind, language, many minds, and culture. The narrative follows the P3 pattern: Answer → Reason → Check.

Why these choices. They illustrate a plausible dependency ladder: gravity enables large-scale structure; atomic and chemical stability enable carbon chemistry; stars and chemistry support life; from life we get mind; language sits between mind and culture; with population dynamics and many minds, culture stabilizes. These are schematic, not doctrinal: edit them to match your preferred story.

How it works.

• Library. The available stabilizations (laws) you can switch on.
• Path. A sequence of steps “stabilize LAW”. As steps accumulate, dependencies fire and new features appear.
• Goal. We ask for a particular observation set—here including life, mind, language, many-minds, culture (plus galaxies and carbon chemistry).
• Search. Breadth‑first enumeration up to a depth limit. Thorough explores different orderings and keeps going after success; Fast dedupes by state and stops at the first success.
• Selection. From all consistent endpoints we pick the shortest path; ties are broken deterministically by action strings.
• Checks. Independent validations: recompute closure; confirm the observation set; monotone growth along the path; minimality of laws and steps; acyclic feature graph; and permutation‑invariance spot checks.

How to use. Choose a mode, tune Max Depth and Cap Paths, optionally add Permutation Trials, then click Run. The status row shows search scale; the three boxes list the chosen answer, a short reasoning narrative, and the check report.

What to expect. In this setup, a typical minimal path stabilizes atoms → chemistry (unlocking carbon chemistry), gravity (unlocking galaxies, stars, and—given other pieces—life and mind), communication (enabling language with mind), then population dynamics (yielding many minds and culture).

What this is not. Not a scientific claim or full simulation. Dependencies are illustrative and deliberately compact. Modify the PR map and OBS set in the code to try your own hypotheses.

Determinism. With the same settings you’ll get the same selected path; only the search order changes when you change mode or parameters.