A world that grows itself.

What replicates, and what never does

Inside Meridian, the things that are meant to multiply are residents, households, buildings, districts and the techniques people use. They grow through work the residents do, and every change is written to the city’s permanent record.

The software does not replicate. Meridian is not a program that copies itself onto other machines or finds its own computing power. It runs on a server a person controls, with a spending limit and an off switch. The project’s constitution rules out building an intelligent self-replicator.

Published milestones (October 2026)

• City snapshot: about 122 residents with homes, work, travel and a railway, described in October 2026 as running since 2 September 2026 on a record of more than nine million entries.
• Recorded expansion: residents had charted the fog at the edge of the map, and the count of places rose from 473 to 549 over about 8,660 world minutes.
• Planned at that point: natural births. One recorded family change added twins on 9 October. Consenting households having children of their own was planned, and the published population was still 122.

What would count as real self-replication

1. A household decides to have a child, and that child grows up and works.
2. A technique one resident invents spreads to others and makes later work better.
3. A district gets planned, built and lived in without a person designing it.
4. All of it survives a restart and can be replayed from the record.

A proposal does not count, and neither does a good-looking picture. It counts when the record shows it happened.

Why build it in public

You can watch for free, and the proportions are published: how much is decided by AI and how much by rules.

Counted on 31 October 2026, about 45 world days after the public count began: 6,325 model choices accepted, made by 78 residents. At that moment, of the 121 tasks under way, the rules had picked 118 and a model had picked 3. In that snapshot, Meridian’s rules picked most tasks. We publish that count because the word “AI” means little without it, and the feature list on GitHub keeps the running record.

Keep reading

Why this is an AGI experiment, and not AGI · How Meridian compares with other AI civilisation simulations · Questions people ask