How AI solved open math problem (NOT REALLY)

Every project has an origin story. Ours starts in a high-school bedroom in 2019, with a phone running InstLife and a teenager thinking the thought that has launched a thousand side projects: I could make a better version of this.

2019: the first attempt

Text-based life simulators were having a moment. InstLife — and later BitLife — proved the formula: a random life, one year per tap, and the strange pull of watching a stranger's biography assemble itself. What they lacked was depth you could push against: an economy, careers that felt different from one another, property that mattered.

So, armed with Create React App and Material-UI, work started in August 2019. The commit log from back then is a time capsule — Job fix, changed skills, Business :D, UI fix businesses. Twenty commits in the autumn of 2019. The game had jobs, skills, businesses, houses, and a proud version string: v.1.2-beta "Alexandra".

This is what playing it looked like — a column of labeled numbers and a pink NEXT YEAR button. Honest work for a first attempt:

2020: limited time kills the initiative

Then time did what time does. Three commits trickled out in 2020 — the last one in August is titled, with accidental poetry, “Update, but doesn't exist anymore.” The initiative was dead.

It stayed dead for over five years.

2026: the idea comes back

This year the itch returned, and this time the timetable lost. The old repository woke up to more than a hundred commits: the text lists became a real interface, the imagined characters became low-poly 3D people on a turntable, houses grew procedurally furnished multi-floor interiors, and the economy learned to push back — loans, upkeep, bankruptcy, weddings priced to your wealth, and a divorce court that takes its cut.

Same game, same idea, seven years apart:

The results are promising. The life loop runs from birth to gravestone, the special careers (footballer, musician, actor) play by their own rules, and the whole thing still runs entirely in the browser — the original 2019 promise, finally kept.

The game launches soon. Join the waitlist and you'll get exactly one email when it does.