Living Worlds

Research · Scale · Oct 5, 2026

A billion lives' worth of months, on one GPU

Met250,000,000 lives, 12 months; 10 seeds for equivalence

The test at a glance

What it tests
Speed and correctness. Simple lives: births, deaths, partnerships and separations on stated rates.
Data
Simulated lives on UK 2019 tables with placeholder partnership rates: 200,000 lives x 10 seeds for equivalence, 250,000,000 lives x 12 months for speed.
Held out
Not a held-out test: speed, and equality with the CPU engine.
Compared against
The monthly CPU engine, seed by seed.
Bar
Every count equivalent AND at least 10^9 life-months a second at 250,000,000 lives.
Result
1.36 x 10^9 life-months a second, identical on all 10 seeds; replicated on a second GPU.

Living Worlds runs 1.36 billion life-months a second on one GPU (an NVIDIA GB10), 250 million lives over 12 months, past the registered 10^9, and its results are identical to the CPU engine: every birth, death, partnership and separation of all 10 seeds. A follow-up build that holds the population in GPU memory ran a billion lives at 9.2 x 10^8 and 250 million at 2.3 x 10^9, still identical. Registered before any GPU run, and replicated as registered on a second GPU (an RTX 5070 Ti): identical on all 10 seeds, at 3.68 x 10^9 life-months a second for 150 million lives. The first build could not allocate a billion-life world; the follow-up build did. These are simple lives at scale: births, deaths, partnerships and separations on stated rates, with placeholder partnership rates. Voiced lives, which speak and remember, are a smaller layer.

Scale

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