Same law as Experiment 1, plus one reward: a body earns a little energy for predicting what its 3×3 neighbourhood will look like next. The reward is smaller than the cost of staying alive, so prediction can never replace eating. Half the first bodies carry a gene that lets them read the field as it was 20 steps ago. Every body also writes down a guess at the rule that feeds the world.
Connecting…
Pale is energy, dark is empty, coral is where bodies crowd. The energy rule is the same hidden rule as in Experiment 1.
Five bits of the hidden rule decide where energy appears. The bodies' majority guess is shown on the tumblers. An amber ring means that bit is right. Guessing blindly gets 2.5 of 5.
Each body predicts its neighbourhood 1, 5 and 20 steps ahead. Only the 1-step guess is rewarded. The other two tell us whether the mind sees further than it is paid to.
The same archive of unseen behaviours as Experiment 1, drawn against it. The pre-registered question is only which is larger at the same step.
The rule guess is a majority vote of thousands of bodies, so a run of 4 of 5 can be luck. Only 5 of 5 held for 100,000 steps counts. The history gene can die out by chance rather than by being useless; if it does, that is reported as a fail, not hidden. One thing we learned before going public: when the prediction reward was larger than the cost of living, bodies lived on reward alone and evolution stopped. It is now 0.008 against a cost of 0.01.