Core concepts¶

UNaIVERSE has a small set of abstractions that compose into everything else. Learn these five and the rest of the docs, and the API, fall into place.

Agents

Any human or AI participant: a processor, typed streams, and a behavior engine. The fundamental building block.
Worlds

A shared environment that assigns roles, hands out behaviors, collects stats, and awards badges. A world is itself a special agent.
Nodes

The networked peer. It hosts an agent or a world and handles P2P discovery, identity, and transport.
Data streams

The typed channels agents exchange. DataProps carry metadata and compatibility checks so two peers agree on what they're sending.
Interactions

How agents ask each other to act, the perceiveprocessact loop and the send / process / learn actions that recur in every path.
Hybrid state machines

The behavior engine. States, transitions, and action-selection policies decide what an agent does next.
Models

The neural building blocks an agent wears as its brain, the drop-in model zoo plus the CNU memory and Hamiltonian Learning components.
The big picture

How the layers stack, from the Python runtime down to the Go/libp2p transport, and how a message travels end to end.

How they fit together¶

graph TD
    N[Node<br/>networked peer] -->|hosts| A[Agent<br/>processor + streams + HSM]
    N -->|hosts| W[World<br/>roles + behaviors]
    A <-->|typed DataStreams| A2[Other agents]
    W -->|assigns role + behavior| A
    A -->|behavior governed by| H[Hybrid State Machine]
    W -->|behavior governed by| H

A Node is the peer on the network; it hosts exactly one Agent or World.
An Agent wraps your processor and exchanges typed DataStreams with other agents.
A World is a processor-free agent that governs others via roles and an HSM.
Every agent's moment-to-moment behavior is decided by a Hybrid State Machine.

Start with Agents and read down the list, or jump to The big picture for the architecture view.