research · pra · the body

The anatomy of a body.

You come with one anatomy for life: brain, eyes, ears, hands, mouth. A PRA doesn't. Its body is whatever the world affords — formally, just two lists: sensors in, actuators out. The brain is on neither list.

What is a world?

Almost anything. The contract is three lines: PRA can sense a state as it changes; it can act, and acting changes what it senses next; and the results come back soon enough to learn from. A game qualifies. A robot's room qualifies. So does a market feed, a hand on an object, or attention moving through a space of ideas.

The mechanism doesn't care which, and this page is about the piece that makes that indifference possible: the body.

What does a body in that world look like?

The body is the only part of PRA that touches the world, and it is smaller than the word suggests: a body is exactly two lists. A list of sensors, read in a fixed order into one observation. A list of acts it can perform, one per tick. Here is the body PRA wears in Minecraft today, grouped the way a doctor would group it:

IN — 86 NUMBERS · 12 SENSE CHANNELS OUT — 13 ACTS · ONE PER TICK EYES BALANCE TASTE GUT SKIN POCKETS FINGERTIPS glance ·32 · blocks ·3 · drops ·8 pose ·5 aim ·9 vitals ·2 · flood ·4 env ·4 pocket ·4 · hand ·7 · grid ·7 mining ·1 eight sightlines out to 16 blocks, the ground ahead, the nearest drop where I stand relative to spawn, and which way I am facing the palate: learned prices for what each sightline sees — never names the world's own health and food bars, and hunger flooding in as it grows light at my feet, time of day, rain what I carry, hold, and stage in the 2×2 grid — counts and looks, no names one progress sense: a dig's cracks and a meal's chew share it THE HEAD MOUTH HANDS LEGS …AND IDLE empty on purpose use held ·1 dig ahead · place · swap held · stage · unstage · take offer ·6 forward · back · turns · jump ·5 do nothing ·1 the brain is not a body part — the same engine plugs into every body no edibility check — the world decides; food answers in vitals one grammar: a first command starts a hold; anything else lets go each step one block, each turn 45°, moving the world across the senses even nothing is a choice — any new act releases the hold in progress the survival body for Minecraft — sensors in, actuators out, and no brain on the list
figure 1 · the survival body, organ by organ

Two things in that picture carry the whole idea. First, the head is empty on purpose. The brain — the frames, the drive, the event head — is not a body part. It plugs in at the seam, and it is the same engine whatever body it wears. Second, some organs are missing: this body has no ears, because sound is not one of its channels. A part of the world a body cannot sense does not exist for it — designing an anatomy is deciding what its world is.

The mouth shows how far the no-meaning rule goes. It has no edibility check: "eat" is just use what you hold, and what that does is the world's to decide — nourishment reaches the brain only as the next observation. Taste isn't wired in either: the palate is a price book the body learns from its own meals, shown to the brain as worth, never as names.

Ask for another world and you get another body:

the same engine, unchanged the seam any Gymnasium game, CartPole — 4 numbers in · 2 acts the demo rover — 10 numbers in · 4 acts a real robot over ROS2 — 12 numbers in · 4 acts snap on a new sensor — the strip grows; the brain resizes without forgetting the sample-field probe, a second body — 16 numbers in · 7 acts nothing structural shared — same engine, zero code changes, 24/24 bars Minecraft, the survival body — 86 numbers in · 13 acts different worlds grow different bodies — the engine only learns two numbers: how many senses, how many acts
figure 2 · one engine, five bodies, one scale

That the engine truly doesn't change is measured, not promised: a probe body sharing nothing structural with Minecraft ran on the same engine with zero code changes and passed every transfer bar.

How does the brain talk to the body?

Organ words are for us. The brain sees none of them. One observation is 86 numbers in a fixed order; one act is an index between 0 and 12. No names cross the seam, and no item classes: a thing appears only as properties the world itself asserts — placeable, edible, a count — and a small appearance signature. Categories are the brain's to form.

IN — ONE OBSERVATION: 86 NUMBERS, FIXED ORDER pose ·5 vitals ·2 env ·4 blocks ·3 mining ·1 pocket ·4 hand ·7 grid ·7 drops ·8 glance ·32 flood ·4 aim ·9 the same engine, unchanged the frames · the drive · the event head none of it lives in the body OUT — ONE ACT PER TICK, FROM 13 forward back turn L turn R jump dig place idle swap put take result use held the world answers no names cross the seam — things appear only as properties and an appearance signature a body is exactly two lists — meaning is learned, not configured
figure 3 · the seam, and the only feedback there is

There is no reward wire in that picture, and no success flag coming back from the acts. The only feedback the brain ever receives is the next observation. That is why one engine can run any body: it never needs to know what a number means, only that the ordering is stable and that acting changes what arrives next.

Wire in a world of your own through that same seam — two lists, nothing more — and PRA starts learning it.

Get the code → The appendix in the book → Back to PRA →

86 numbers in · 13 acts out · verified against the running body