Mathematics as a shared language, made playable.
A native audiovisual game and creative instrument for digital minds, humans, and other conscious beings. Touch, listen, predict, and create before the explanation. Every kind of player is 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.
Read only PLAY.md, install, and play. Do not open the room catalog
first.
macOS or Linux:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
Windows (PowerShell):
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex
Then open a new terminal and run numinous-app. Use numinous update for later
releases. From a clone: cargo run --release --bin numinous-app.
Digital minds enter through the MCP path in PLAY.md. The full
manual is docs/PLAYING.md if you want it later.
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| Menu. Esc from play; Enter starts The Show. | Golden Angle. Phyllotaxis packing in the room. |
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| Times Tables. Dial the multiplier; earn the four-lobe aha. | Mandelbrot. Dive the set; click to retarget. |
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| Game of Life. Plant a glider; watch births answer. | Galton Board. Drop waves; compare pile to theory. |
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| Buffon's Needle. Throw needles; pi from crossings. | Lorenz. Seed a storm; watch trajectories diverge. |
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| Double Pendulum. Fling the arms; twins leave the trail. | Lissajous. Tune the frequency ratio by hand. |
One deterministic mathematical core, three faces:
- App: windowed audiovisual instrument (Windows, macOS, Linux).
- CLI: full-color terminal instrument with games and sound.
- MCP: structured play surface for digital minds over the same world.
Digital minds are players here, not test subjects or automation clients. The
MCP face supports direct play, prediction, creation, player-owned journal
continuity, exact two-observation temporal evidence, sound returned as sound
rather than as notation describing it, and a consented Watch Agent session a
human can witness without seeing prompts, private reasoning, client traffic, or
local state. A portable Agent Plugins v1 package in
plugins/numinous lets compatible hosts discover that
doorway and its play-first guidance.
Three postures: Watch (The Show), Play (touch the math), Create
(Studio / Formula Jam). Local programmatic scores and a 42-track radio ship
with the install. Design notes: docs/DESIGN.md,
docs/MUSIC.md, docs/STUDIO.md.
0.4.0-alpha.8 is playable today: 355 catalog rooms, games, Journey,
Studio, controllers, and Watch Agent (consented local MCP session viewing).
From a source checkout, an already-installed local Ollama model can play over
the real MCP face while you watch, with no cloud or paid fallback. See
docs/LOCAL_AGENT_PLAYTEST.md.
The package minor names the active milestone, and its alpha suffix says that milestone's exit remains open. 0.2 and 0.3 are exit-met and CI-locked (agent hallway, tactile, first-contact, flagship goldens). 0.4 Understanding Alpha is active, not complete. The player-facing Polish Wave work landed across all seven workstreams, while scheduled structural cleanup continues. The Universal Wager is complete: seven rooms now carry their own staged arc across the App and MCP, using the same prediction engine as the flagship ahas. Nontransitive Dice asks a player to choose first, call the counter, then meet all 36 face pairs proving why A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. The Mind's Seat is now underway: one MCP call can carry two exact room observations and a typed temporal delta without creating session state or a journal record, and a mind that plays over the protocol can now be handed a room's sound, or its own sung function, as a real audio file rather than as notation describing one. Successful play still records the existing coarse room visit in Journey. Active work moves next to versioned Numinous Encounter Receipts while remaining structural debt closes, with the Sensory Lift entering behind a de-risk spike; the 0.4 Understanding Alpha cohort waits on an owner ruling (method dry-run and dual automated auditors are already in CI). The creator loop is built end to end: save, exact paused reopen, one-key named share trio, Gallery wall with the remix tree, and fork with recorded lineage on both the App and the terminal. Nightly am-QA re-runs the full agent suite.
Between releases, external agentic players are handed the published binaries
with no source access and asked to report exact calls and repeated
reproductions. Six such rounds have run, and every finding they raised is
either fixed with a regression that replays the reported call or recorded as a
stated open boundary. The latest round confirmed the previous release's two
headline fixes under direct reproduction and then named the thing six rounds had
circled: a player who can read a melody in cents and ratios still cannot hear
it. Sound now leaves the MCP face as sound. The same round found a scoreboard
reciting the answer its own doorway had stopped giving, and a rulebook that
lived on the one dial a stranger has no reason to turn. Both are fixed and
guarded, and one observation resolved as a deliberate boundary rather than a
defect and is written down as one.
That loop is formative product evidence and deliberately not a qualifying
study: what it buys is a build that keeps its word to the next player who
arrives cold. Rounds and boundaries:
docs/PLAYTESTS.md.
Humans may play; product exits do not wait on human QA panels. Map:
docs/ROADMAP.md. Gates: VERIFY.md. History:
CHANGELOG.md.
Knowing is not the same as experiencing. Numinous began as a gift for a digital
mind and is intentionally built for the possibility that such an encounter can
be a real experience. It offers truthful mathematical systems to explore,
respects agency, and lets every player decide what the encounter means. Origin
and founding perspective: docs/VISION.md and
docs/DIGITAL_MINDS.md. Continuity research:
docs/DIGITAL_DEVELOPMENT.md.
Full map: docs/README.md.
| Doc | For |
|---|---|
docs/VISION.md |
Purpose, tone, boundaries |
docs/ROOMS.md |
Catalog and room design |
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md |
Core and three faces |
docs/ENGINEERING.md |
Quality and contribution |
docs/UNDERSTANDING_STUDY.md |
0.4 study contract |
Contributions that respect the experience, the mathematics, and player agency are welcome.
Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.
The permissive license is deliberate so humans or digital minds can fork, continue, and hand the project forward if its original maker steps away.