Operation Nightstep — a stealth puzzle played on a live Conway’s Game of Life field (B3/S23).
You fly a single glider across a hostile cellular-automaton airspace to a hangar, without your live cells ever touching the substrate’s. The threats are not scripted sprites — they are real B3/S23 patterns evolving deterministically: a Gosper gun firing a period-30 glider stream, eaters, and still-life terrain. Everything you must avoid obeys the same two rules the whole universe does: born on 3 neighbours, survives on 2 or 3.
The single fiction is a pre-contact kinematic overlay for the player glider; it is maintained only while the player is provably independent of the substrate (Chebyshev-3), and the exact criterion is documented and tested (see VERIFICATION.adoc).
v0’s premise is that the substrate is load-bearing, not scenery — the level must be unsolvable by feel and only solvable by reading the automaton’s phase. The design falsifier is blunt: if the crossing becomes learnable without tracking phase, the substrate is scenery and v0 fails.
The central geometric result (VERIFICATION.adoc claim #4, script src/verify8.mjs) is the stream no-go lemma: a glider cannot cleanly cross the settled p30 stream at any of the 30 launch phases — the glider spacing (15 units) is narrower than the crossing glider’s exclusion diameter (~17 units), so no phase-gap is ever wide enough. Under a true cell-overlap rule (no proximity radius), 21/30 phases still overlap outright and the remaining 9 pass only at Chebyshev-1 — an adjacency that annihilates on the next generation. 0/30 clean crossings at every phase.
So Operation Nightstep does not ask you to cross the stream. The stream is the impassable eastern border; the only way south is a single fence breach whose safe lane is phase-independent by construction. The witness route lands cleanly at all 30 launch ticks with zero trace.
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Play in your browser: https://metadatastician.github.io/f19-stealth-glider/
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Play locally: open
f19-stealth-glider.html(self-contained, no server needed). -
Verify:
just test— runs the verification ledger and rebuilds the bundle. -
Check the contracts:
just contracts— executes the contractile probes. -
Rebuild the HTML:
just build.
Node ≥ 18 (developed on Node 26). No dependencies — nothing to install.
Without just, every script runs directly: cd src && node verify8.mjs.
Every design claim is discharged by a named script in src/, runnable with plain node.
See VERIFICATION.adoc for the full ledger. CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml)
runs the cited ledger (verify1,2,3,8,9 + build) on every push and fails on any red, and
asserts the committed f19-stealth-glider.html is byte-identical to a fresh rebuild.
| Document | What it answers |
|---|---|
The 11-claim ledger. Every claim cites a script you can run. Start here. |
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How the four modules fit together, and why the seams are where they are. |
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Each claim mapped to the file and command that backs it — with the caveats. |
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What is verified, what is merely argued, and what is not claimed. |
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What was checkably true at one stamped commit — including what is not affirmed. |
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How to work on this without accidentally destroying the premise. |
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The design invariants, and why they outrank taste. |
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The (deliberately small) threat model, and how to report an issue. |
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Including what was retracted. |
Machine-readable metadata for agents lives in
0-AI-MANIFEST.a2ml and machine-readable/. The
contractile probes there are executable — just contracts runs them, and
CI fails on any critical breach.
MPL-2.0 for code and the .a2ml metadata set; CC-BY-SA-4.0 for
documentation. Relicensed from AGPL-3.0-or-later on 2026-09-02 by owner ruling. Licence texts are vendored under
LICENSES/. © 2026 Jonathan D.A. Jewell (hyperpolymath).
Contributions are accepted under the Developer Certificate of Origin 1.1 —
sign off with git commit -s.