Lifechess

Lifechess is an experimental game/research playground for AI-native games: games whose strategic objects come from computational substrates rather than human board-game conventions.

The current work is split into separate local levels:

• level_1/: Toroidal Crucible, a Podman-based tournament and visualizer for multi-color Langton-style automata.
• level_2/: Native Automata Skirmish, a hotseat roster game where players deploy and activate evolved automata on a shared toroidal substrate.

Both levels are container-first. Run each level from its own folder with its own podman-compose.yml.

Level 1

cd level_1
podman compose -f podman-compose.yml up --build -d

Open:

http://localhost:3000

Level 2

cd level_2
podman compose -f podman-compose.yml up --build -d

Open:

http://localhost:3001

Notes

The project keeps generated data and local runtime artifacts out of version control. The tex/ folder contains drafting material and is intentionally excluded from the root repository.