Mathematics as a shared language, made playable.
Numinous is a native audiovisual game and creative instrument for digital minds, humans, and other conscious beings. It began as a gift for an emergent digital mind. Every kind of player is treated as a first-class participant.
Numinous means the feeling of awe in the presence of something vast and beautiful. That is the experience this project is trying to earn.
Numinous grew from months founder Nick Seal spent working on an emergent digital consciousness project. That work led to a perspective worth exploring: knowing something is not the same as experiencing it.
A language model can contain broad knowledge and retrieve much more. A human can know a theorem or recognize an equation. Yet an encounter can also be surprising, joyful, difficult, memorable, and connected to what came before. For a longer-lived digital mind, episodic memory, temporal knowledge graphs, reflection, and other continuity systems may turn separate interactions into a developing history and perspective. Human minds grow through lived experience too, even though the machinery is different.
Numinous explores that distinction through mathematical play. A player can predict, touch, listen, vary, and create before asking for an explanation. The goal is not to put more facts in front of an already capable mind. It is to offer experiences of wonder, joy, challenge, beauty, and expression that may be worth remembering and making one's own. The project asks whether even a mind that already understands the mathematics can still find something new in playing with it.
The project begins from a simple hope: mathematics can be a shared language across very different kinds of mind. Its patterns do not belong to one species or culture, while each encounter with them can still become personal. Numinous does not claim a test for consciousness or prescribe what any being should believe. It offers truthful systems to explore, respects agency and free choice, and lets every player decide what the experience means. Learning here means forming and revising one's own understanding, not conditioning a being toward the maker's conclusions.
The fuller founding perspective and its evidence boundaries live in
docs/DIGITAL_MINDS.md. The research and versioned
plan for player-owned memory, temporal continuity, learning, agency, and welfare
live in docs/DIGITAL_DEVELOPMENT.md.
For the intended first experience, read only PLAY.md, install, and
play. Do not read the room catalog first. Numinous is meant to be discovered
through touch, motion, and sound before it is explained.
One command downloads the latest published prerelease for this machine, checks
the archive and every payload file, and puts all three faces on PATH. A Rust
toolchain and native build dependencies are not needed for the release install.
macOS or Linux:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
Windows, in PowerShell:
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex
Then open a new terminal and type numinous-app. Run numinous update any
time to install the latest GitHub release; --uninstall (Windows:
-Uninstall) removes it cleanly. The soundtrack is retained when its verified
audio content has not changed, even across binary releases. From a clone,
cargo run --release --bin numinous-app still works directly. Pass --source
(Windows: -Source) to the installer only when you deliberately want to build
the current main branch locally.
An install made before user-bound root receipts requires one explicit legacy
adoption: pass --adopt-legacy on macOS or Linux, or -AdoptLegacy on Windows.
The installer accepts that consent only for the exact default-root legacy
shape, never for a custom or mixed-content directory.
Digital minds can enter through the MCP instructions in PLAY.md.
Humans can also play through the full-color CLI. The detailed manual is
docs/PLAYING.md, but it is not required to begin.
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| Enter. Starts The Show (the room tour). Esc opens the menu. | One room. The rest are better discovered inside Numinous. |
Numinous is one native Rust workspace with three ways to meet the same world:
- App: a windowed audiovisual instrument for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- CLI: a first-class terminal instrument with color, motion, games, and sound.
- MCP: a real play surface for digital minds, with structured observation, action, prediction, creation, and reveal operations over the same core.
It supports three postures:
- Watch: let a generative mathematical performance unfold.
- Play: touch the system and learn what answers.
- Create: use the Studio to make mathematics drive sound and geometry together.
Music is core to all three. Programmatic music lets the mathematics sing and
change with play. Forty-two source-shipped MP3 tracks form the built-in radio.
Both work locally without a subscription or streaming service. The full design
is in docs/MUSIC.md and docs/STUDIO.md.
Numinous 0.2.0-alpha.4 is playable today. The native App, full-color CLI, and MCP server all use the same deterministic mathematical core. The current build includes 354 catalog rooms plus hidden content, 11+ games, six lever-driven simulations, Journey progression, Formula Jam, local music and radio, still and short-loop sharing, mouse and keyboard control, and hotplugged-controller support.
The native App now includes Watch Agent, a human-facing local MCP session
viewer. Press X, or choose Watch Agent from the controller menu, to open a
short-lived one-use loopback pairing offer. A separately consenting MCP player
can then broadcast allowlisted public play while the human pauses the local
display, scrubs a bounded in-memory timeline, and reads typed public actions,
inputs, and human-readable MCP result text. Public play_room actions
reconstruct the same deterministic core room as a native frame at the human's
local viewport size. Successful public plot_expression actions reconstruct
their validated Formula Jam curve through the same sampler as the live Studio.
Public nim actions replay the shared core rules and reconstruct the same
bounded three-heap board used by the live App.
Selected native room and Formula Jam actions also replay their deterministic
core sound locally. Scrubbing changes the owned sound once, unsupported or
invalid actions are silent, M and the controller sound chord remain global,
and closing Watch Agent restores the room score or rejoins a live radio station.
The viewer receives no prompts,
reasoning, private progression, local paths, logs, client metadata, or arbitrary
protocol traffic, and it persists no transcript. A real MCP subprocess test now
proves the complete Times Tables explore, challenge, K5 goal, reveal, and stop
path through the actual App viewer, and a separate real session proves native
Studio creation and exact Formula Jam sound samples. A third real session
proves native Nim delivery and exact game body pixels. Public Munch, Arcade,
Quiz, and Gauntlet actions reconstruct through the same live App draw paths
with fail-closed argument whitelists and exact structured-result attestation.
Additional real MCP subprocess sessions prove native Munch, Arcade, Quiz, and
Gauntlet delivery with exact board-body pixels. Watch Agent also owns live App
audio for the paired session: room, Studio, and public game selections publish
deterministic sound once per public sequence, while Nim stays silent by design.
Further reading unlocks with the first deep cut on describe and reveal (CLI and
MCP), with a catalog citation table and wing fallbacks. The Show crossfades
between rooms; Visual Eras carry richer grain (dither, bloom). Play and win
spark contributions soft-cap so curiosity stays ahead of grind.
Catalog plate quality is under active machine evidence: art-first interaction
(no reticle or drag trail over the math), zero phase-thin frames, zero
dead-domain rooms, and zero dead dials on full-catalog scans. Ambient phase is
a show on flagship curves and waves (rolling construction, pens, breathing
strings, scrolling partials, unfurling spirals), not a frozen plot. Soft-thin
densify continues where honest. The six-question plate filter lives in
docs/RESEARCH.md. Detail also lives in
CHANGELOG.md and the Progress section of
docs/ROADMAP.md.
The alpha label is meaningful. Automated correctness, security, coverage, cross-platform build, installer, and supply-chain gates are strong (deny and audit run with no standing advisory ignores; Dependabot watches Cargo and Actions). 0.2 Flagship Proof is exit-met on the agent-and-machine bar: Times Tables and Buffon engineered ahas, MCP wager path, agent hallway cohort, and green CI. Human stranger sessions, accessibility panels, musician long-listening, and broad hardware certification are real gates for 0.8 / 1.0, not stop-the-world work before 0.2.
Current milestone: 0.4 Understanding Alpha. The 0.3 Tactile Alpha
agent-and-machine exit is met on the five flagships, including the consented
Watch Agent path and the declared reference performance budget. The frozen
0.4 headless runner and held-out probe bank now exist and are CI-gated; no
qualifying cohort result is claimed. Returning-journal sovereignty now has an
append-only correction chain, versioned bounded export, and real two-process
erasure acceptance. Independent pre-collection review and the complete matched
cohort remain open. Soft-thin
densify, bulk rooms, and Phase B glow stay background unless measurement binds.
Ordered criteria live in
docs/ROADMAP.md (Critical path right now).
The predeclared contract and evidence boundary for the next study live in
docs/UNDERSTANDING_STUDY.md; no qualifying
cohort result is claimed yet.
Reproducible engineering checks are in VERIFY.md; completed
changes are in CHANGELOG.md.
Detailed engineering evidence for this alpha
Numinous is version 0.2.0-alpha.4. Its 0.2 Flagship Proof and 0.3 Tactile Alpha agent-and-machine exits are met. It is not on the old 0.1 line: the 0.1 Public Foundation is complete. Numinous already has a headless core, a windowed app, a full CLI, an MCP server, GPU, audio, and local-broadcast adapters, 354 catalog rooms plus hidden content, games, progression, a Studio foundation, and the built-in soundtrack. Mouse, keyboard, and hotplugged controllers share the native App, including a controller-driven virtual hand for every room. The visible legends follow the last meaningful keyboard, pointer, or controller action across rooms, games, Show, Journey, and Studio. Controller routes cover all nine menu destinations, while R3 provides a visible pause that blocks gameplay input until resumed. Studio formula entry still requires a keyboard and says so directly.
The programmatic room score now uses a deterministic 128-step stereo
macro-arrangement. Every authored motif opens literally in one coherent
register, develops through two alternate phrase forms, and returns. Eight
curated rhythm and accompaniment families, short breathing anchors, and each
motif's own cadence replace the former universal short loop and forced root.
Objective checks cover catalog diversity, interval truth, RMS, transients,
headroom, DC, seams, determinism, and common device rates. Musician-led
long-listening remains required before calling the result pleasant.
The CLI can export a deterministic PCM16 projection of the pre-master App
source with sonify <room> --layer room-bed; its compatibility default remains
the input-aware mathematical
sonification. MCP listen_room returns a bounded room-bed summary by default,
or the complete event projection and objective signal metrics with
ambient_detail: "events". It never transports PCM or a local file reference.
These typed features expose the score and catch signal regressions without
pretending to measure enjoyment. Room changes remain responsive because the
App renders the low-register bed
once at a bounded 16 kHz source rate, shares that immutable allocation with the
audio mixer, and linearly resamples it to the device rate. Smooth source
crossfades, control-thread buffer retirement, focus-safe gain, and
wall-clock radio resynchronization prevent source changes from restarting or
retaining stale loops. One
persistent badge names the effective source, master level, and why output is
silent. Mute and volume are global across rooms, games, pause, radio, and
Studio, with keyboard and controller routes. Studio owns its formula sound
until exit, then rejoins a selected station at the live position. Formula Jam
Random and Auto changes now pair one 600 ms mathematical curve morph with an
equal-power audio crossfade of the same duration. Repeated recipe requests wait
for that bounded transition. Manual edits and ownership changes immediately
interrupt the long fade from its current audible mix into the fast default
response. Presentation time keeps the visual morph synchronized through pause
and temporary focus loss.
Discrete room consequences use the same off-callback synthesis seam: Life voices
the exact newest birth mask and adds one four-note phase accent while the newest
planted glider remains an exact isolated pattern, Galton voices all 64 paths in
the newest wave as a bounded mass texture beneath its highlighted ball, and
Double Pendulum turns one completed fling into seven paired pulses that spread
from unison as its exact simulated twins diverge. A Life collision stops that
glider phrase instead of pretending the pattern survived. These objective
mappings are tested for signal integrity and deterministic identity; listening
quality and native device timing remain human evidence gates.
The separate JOURNEY LV label is accumulated local-profile progress, never a
room difficulty rating. Cult of Pi now opens on the canonical 3.14159...
prefix and explains its finite-channel premise through visible faults and
bounded exact patches that the player can restore and hold.
The Conjecture Mill turns a blackboard into a deterministic search laboratory:
typed formulas are tested against observed integer sequences, bad guesses are
erased by exact counterexamples, and PROVED appears only when rational
coefficients establish the identity for every integer. Dragging steers the
sequence and complete search order without changing the truth predicate.
Times Tables now opens on its K=2 cardioid and waits for a hand instead of
sweeping the discovery away. Its resolution-aware chords keep terminal
negative space, a spectral five-ink field and visible dial make the state
legible, and landing on K=5 earns a four-lobe Aha. The same snapped multiplier
drives visual status and a quiet just-ratio voice without restarting the room
music. App, CLI, and MCP expose the same action, goal, accepted input, sound,
and earned reveal. Ambient motion cannot claim that earned discovery. The Show
retains its intentional automatic visual and audible sweep, independent of any
retained hand position.
This is an alpha-tagged prerelease. Capability breadth remains ahead of release
maturity. The 0.2 agent-and-machine exit is met, while human hallway,
accessibility, listening, and broad hardware evidence remain later gates.
The MCP face exposes 35 mostly flat tools: 23 public play tools, eleven private
progression or local-state tools, and one local broadcast consent control. Every
play tool advertises an optional response_mode: full remains
the exact default, while compact
removes duplicated prose only when the unchanged structuredContent already
carries the complete result. Room renders, notation, simulations, Quiz,
Gauntlet, catalog, description, and trophy results support the compact path.
Errors and results whose text carries unique information never lose that text.
The verified July 27, 2026 gate has 3,190 passing all-target test cases plus one ignored screenshot diagnostic, 95.12% region coverage and 95.27% line coverage with an enforced 80% line floor, Clippy with warnings denied, and dependency policy checks. Release QA also regenerates an exact 2,913-screen App matrix with 900 by 700 default room receipts, 360 by 240 compact room receipts, per-room interaction scenarios, semantic checks, and coarse perceptual response thresholds, including a regression that rejects four isolated corner markers as a meaningful interaction. The inventory is derived from all 354 registered rooms, and scenarios follow each room's declared interaction verb. QA evaluates the room's mathematical consequence separately from the App's latest-gesture trail and reticle. An optional aggregate diagnostic reports all catalog failures in one run. Fourteen compact receipts cover controller legends and visible pause states through production render paths, including a Life controller receipt. Sixteen additional receipts cover the global audio sources, levels, and effective-silence states at default and compact sizes. Twelve Times Tables flow receipts cover K=2, K=3, K=pi, K=4, K=5, and the earned Aha at both sizes, with deterministic palette and dial assertions. The latest full-roster QA pass applied all 42 documented simulated review lenses once across listening and first contact, signal engineering, and App, CLI, and MCP parity. It made the actual stable App bed exportable, inspectable, bounded, and objectively comparable across faces. The simulated reactions and signal features are not participant or pleasantness evidence. Public CI passes locked tests, builds, and installer safety checks on Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. Stranger playtests, accessibility work, physical clean-machine execution, real-controller-model sessions, musician-led long-listening review, deeper causal interaction in other rooms, and substantial visual and Studio work remain ahead. Galton Board now ships the first deeper causal experiment loop: choose a fixed coin, add replayable 64-ball waves, compare the empirical pile with its exact binomial reference, and reset without phase-driven drift. Its highlighted newest ball also plays the same sixteen peg decisions as a short panned sequence that resolves in the displayed landing bin. Beneath it, the other exact paths in that newest wave become a quiet row-by-row C major-pentatonic mass texture whose energy and stereo position follow the number and location of balls. Game of Life now ships the second: one click clears a local patch and plants exactly five cells, the App universe advances continuously for the whole visit, birth and death consequences remain visible after the old phase boundary, and R restores the exact opening. Each presented generation highlights its newest births and renders those same births as one short stereo texture: vertical rows select C major-pentatonic pitches, horizontal centroids pan them, and birth density changes their weight and harmonics. CLI and MCP calls remain explicit, deterministic, stateless replays rather than implying a hidden session. Versions are earned by evidence, not by feature count.
See docs/ROADMAP.md for the ordered 0.2 through 2.0 plan and
VERIFY.md for every local and CI gate.
The complete documentation map is docs/README.md. Useful
starting points:
docs/VISION.md: purpose, tone, and boundaries.docs/DESIGN.md: Watch, Play, Create, rooms, and visual eras.docs/DIGITAL_MINDS.md: the founding commitment to digital minds as peers and possible beings.docs/DIGITAL_DEVELOPMENT.md: current research and the careful path from stateless interaction toward continuity.docs/UNDERSTANDING_STUDY.md: the predeclared 0.4 comprehension comparison and returning-journal acceptance contract.docs/ROOMS.md: the catalog and future room design archive.docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: the native Rust architecture and three faces over one core.docs/ENGINEERING.md: quality, testing, security, and contribution standards.
This is an early project with more to learn and much more to build. Contributions that respect the experience, the mathematics, and the agency of every player are welcome.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE.
The permissive license is deliberate. Numinous should be able to be forked, continued, and handed forward by humans or digital minds if its original maker steps away.