Come inhabit an exotic world and chisel through a layer cake of thousand-year-old civilizations.
With So Few Farmers, Why Are Video Games About Farming So Popular?
An archaeologist considers what farming simulators reveal about humanity’s ancient and evolving relationship with agriculture.
Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture
Intelligent machines have the potential to uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Emerging evidence from competitive gameplay, such as Go and chess, demonstrates that AI systems are evolving from mere tools to sources of cultural innovation adopted by humans. However, the conditions under which intelligent machines transition from tools to drivers of persistent cultural change remain unclear. We identify three key dimensions that modulate machine influence on human problem-solving: the discovered strategies must be non-trivial, learnable, and offer a clear advantage. Using a cultural transmission experiment, we demonstrate that when these conditions are met, machine-discovered strategies can be transmitted, understood, and preserved by human populations, leading to enduring cultural shifts. Conversely, using agent-based simulations, we show how machine influence is constrained in the absence of these conditions. These findings provide a framework for understanding how machines can persistently expand human cognitive skills and underscore the need to consider their broader implications for human cognition and cultural evolution.
The Myth of the Instant Cake Mix
How to think about creative tooling in the new world of generative AI
Worlding Raga: 4 - Who Worlds?
So far we’ve been discussing Worlding as an art . One that an individual creator can engage in on their own. As Venkat suggested , we are already living in an…
AGENTWORLD | *
An exploration of planetary intelligence, tracing how computation and cosmology—from ancient mechanisms to AI—reshape Earth and its possible futures.
We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.
The Age of Wonders and Terrors
Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, …
This 1986 Japanese adventure game showing up on Steam in 2026 guarantees it makes my GOTY list—you've really got to play it
Relics doesn't belong in a museum: it belongs on your PC.
Anthropeum
A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.
Learning to solve complex tasks by growing knowledge culturally across generations
Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what previous generations believed, valued, and practiced, and how these evolved over time. The power and mechanisms of language as a means of cultural learning, however, are not well understood, and as a result, current AI systems do not leverage language as a means for cultural knowledge transmission. Here, we take a first step towards reverse-engineering cultural learning through language. We developed a suite of complex tasks in the form of minimalist-style video games, which we deployed in an iterated learning paradigm. Human participants were limited to only two attempts (two lives) to beat each game and were allowed to write a message to a future participant who read the message before playing. Knowledge accumulated gradually across generations, allowing later generations to advance further in the games and perform more efficient actions. Multigenerational learning followed a strikingly similar trajectory to individuals learning alone with an unlimited number of lives. Successive generations of learners were able to succeed by expressing distinct types of knowledge in natural language: the dynamics of the environment, valuable goals, dangerous risks, and strategies for success. The video game paradigm we pioneer here is thus a rich test bed for developing AI systems capable of acquiring and transmitting cultural knowledge.
Scientists Are Discovering Long-Lost Rules for Ancient Board Games
You can play reconstructions of ancient board games thanks to these scientists and their algorithms.
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500
Explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization.
The Minecraft Generation (Published 2016)
How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching millions of children to master the digital world.
