The Next Frontier Will Be Synthesis

A glider is five cells. Collide enough of them and you can build a computer. We are building AI the same way: small parts with one job each, made to be combined.

Five cells that walk

In John Conway's Game of Life, every cell on a grid lives or dies by its eight neighbours: a live cell with two or three stays alive, an empty cell with exactly three is born, and every other cell is empty next turn. That is all of it. Press the cells on the left to draw your own pattern and watch it run.

The glider is the pattern above. Richard K. Guy first saw it in 1969, while Conway's group was tracing the R-pentomino. After two turns it is its own mirror image, a glide reflection, which is where the name comes from; after four it is itself again, one cell further along the diagonal. Nothing in the rules says anything about motion, yet the glider travels, at a quarter of the fastest speed the grid allows. It is the smallest pattern that does.

Collisions are construction

Gliders matter because of what happens when they meet. Aim two at each other just right and the debris settles into a block, a beehive or a blinker. Three can build the other small spaceships. Eight, positioned with care, collide into a Gosper glider gun, a machine that fires a new glider every thirty turns. Building a pattern this way has a name: glider synthesis.Shoot two gliders at a block and it moves one way; shoot three and it moves the other. That is a counter. Streams of gliders crossing each other make AND, OR and NOT. Put enough of these together and the Game of Life computes anything a computer can: it is Turing complete. In 2022 a universal constructor was published that starts from fifteen gliders.It has limits, and they are worth knowing. It was long conjectured that every still pattern could be synthesized from gliders. In 2022 Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo built a 306-cell still life that can only have come from itself, so no collision of gliders will ever make it. Synthesis reaches almost everything, not everything.

The emblem

Eric S. Raymond proposed the glider as the hacker emblem: the Game of Life appeals to people who build things, and the glider was born at almost the same time as the Internet and Unix. It stands for a way of working, small pieces, simple rules, and everything else built from them. That is why one walks across our home page.

AI for AI

Hanzo is made of parts that each do one thing, with one interface at api.hanzo.ai, so they can be aimed at each other.

GeneratesZenOpen models, served on our own hardware.

RoutesEnsoEach call to the model that answers it right for the least.

DecidesKaiA probability for every option, and no text written.

RunsGenAny coding agent on Hanzo’s tools and models.

ActsMCPThe tools an agent reaches the world through.

KeepsIAM and KMSWho may do what, and the secrets they do it with.

None of them is the product on its own. The products are collisions. Dev is Gen running an agent with Kai deciding each step and Zen or Enso answering. Enso is a router aimed at everyone's models, ours and the frontier labs'. Studio is workflows aimed at models that make images, sound and video. Each was built by pointing parts that already existed at one another, and each new part makes every earlier one worth more, the way one more glider stream adds a gate to every circuit already on the board.The last frontier was scale: one larger model. The next is synthesis: parts small enough to understand, combined into systems no single part could be. We build those parts in the open, and the most interesting things made from them will not be ours.

Aim the parts at each other

Hanzo Gen Enso Kai A New Pareto Frontier

SourcesGlider (Conway’s Game of Life), Wikipedia Glider, LifeWiki Salo and Törmä, “What can oracles teach us about the ultimate fate of life?” (2022)Eric S. Raymond, “The Glider: Proposal for a Hacker Emblem”