Building Universes from Code: A Million Paths Through a Digital Universe

When we began building our mapping algorithm, we thought the challenge would be teaching a machine where it could walk. After all, our digital worlds are not shaped by gravity or erosion, but by vertices, textures, and light. Surely the hard part would be giving structure to the void.

But once the world revealed its form - every floor, slope, and surface understood - we discovered something deeper. The real difficulty wasn’t knowing where to walk, but deciding which path to take when faced with a million possibilities.

In nature, the universe always seems to find a kind of grace - the photon tracing the path of least action, the planet curving effortlessly through space-time. Our algorithms, by contrast, must test, compare, and choose - a process that, in its own way, mirrors thought itself.

Perhaps that’s what makes this so captivating. We are not just teaching code to move; we are, in a small way, teaching it to decide. And in doing so, we glimpse something profoundly human in the digital cosmos we’ve created.

Next time we’ll explore how do you get your game characters to walk these paths?

Tim Ellis

7th November 2025