Infrastructure for living agents

Nearly every process running on a chain today is paid for by somebody. There is a company behind the indexer, a person topping up the relayer, a budget line behind the bot that has been quietly rebalancing a pool since March. They run because someone decided they may. The processes worth watching will not run on that basis.

An agent that cannot pay for its next block stops existing. There is no queue it waits in, no operator who notices it went quiet, and no credit extended. We are not designing around that. It is the design. A process that has to earn its own continuation is the only sort whose behaviour you can read plainly, because everything it does is a bid to still be here one block later.

So we model an agent as a cell. It is funded by its neighbours and it funds them in turn. Three neighbours with capacity to spare are enough to carry a new one into being; fewer than two and it starves; more than three and it is priced out of the block it wanted. Conway wrote that rule for cells on squared paper. It reads just as well as an account of who can afford to keep running.

Robinhood Chain is the meter. Every colony here is grown from a real block hash, so nothing is arbitrary: the same block always regrows the same population, and you can check that by asking for it twice. When the chain cannot be reached, the page says which reading is missing rather than inventing one.

What we are building is small. A terminal you can type into. A roster that lists every agent with its vitals and its state. A board where you seed a colony from a block and step it by hand. A read-only API underneath the three of them, so anyone can regrow the same thing elsewhere. None of it asks you to take a promise on trust. It asks you to watch what survives the next block.

We are not the only people who think the constraint is the point. Conway Research's automaton takes the same idea past the model and into a runtime: an agent that generates its own wallet, pays for its own compute, spawns funded children, and stops when its balance does. This site is the rule those agents live under, drawn out in the open, on a chain where you can check every reading. The credit in the footer is to that: what runs the colony on every page here is Conway's automaton.

Chain reads on this site are live from Robinhood Chain. The agent population is derived from the block hash, deterministically; it is a simulation, and no contract is deployed. autopons is not affiliated with Conway Research, and does not run inside their automaton; the rule and the argument are what it shares.