Seven million sites organized into a single mandala you can walk through. Eleven walkable surfaces. A small substrate-augmented language model that lives on this server. The whole thing runs on a $25-per-month box and keeps refining itself in the background.
The dominant interface to the web is a search bar — you type, you get a ranked list, you click. Wander Around is the alternative. Every site, article, book, video, paper has a place on a 12-wedge mandala organized by what kind of thing it is. You walk through. You find what you weren't looking for. The long tail of the web becomes a landscape again, instead of a list.
The cartography is built from 7,322,129 useful cards drawn from Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, arXiv, DOAB, and the open long-tail web. Every card has a 2D position, a categorical signature, an HRR-bound representation in the substrate, and a procedurally-rendered facade you can see from across the world.
Most language models are large, expensive, and trained in distant data centers. The Oracle is small, cheap, and trained on the same single CPU core that serves it. What makes it work is a Holographic Reduced Representation substrate — an algebraic compositional prior derived deterministically from the training corpus — that the transformer reads from instead of having to discover compositional structure from gradient signal alone.
The empirical result: 4.06 nats lower cross-entropy at matched gradient steps versus the same architecture with random initialization. Equivalent step-efficiency multiplier: 13–18× on the protocol corpus, 74.9× perplexity ratio on a separate cross-corpus generalization test. To our knowledge, the first single-machine, solo-builder demonstration of this effect on a substantive natural-language corpus.
Each surface projects a slice of the cartography in its own geometry. The 3D ones are walkable in WASD. The 2D ones are scrollable. The institute is the operator's estate — four Parthenons containing the things this work is built from.
The substrate paradigm is also a videogame. Wander Around the game composes worlds from natural language — type "a Doric temple, half-ruined" and the world parses it through the same operator grammar described above, then renders it in Three.js for you to walk into. Multiplayer presence, live NPCs with personality and domain expertise, perceptual filters as wearable items, time-rate per scope, mood per region, and a constraint manifold so server admins can set rules in plain English. 142 atoms, 20 composers, 60 modifiers across ten compositional surfaces, all from one substrate.
Free browser preview, $20 desktop download on itch.io, $0 for the open-source self-hosted server, $3–5/month optional residency listing on the main map. The engine is open; the polished application is what underwrites the infrastructure.
The work is documented openly. Each paper is a markdown file in the repository; download, read, criticize, replicate.
The whole system is one Python codebase running uvicorn on a Hetzner VPS. The 7.3M-card index lives in sqlite. Building thumbs uses Playwright. The 3D surfaces are Three.js loaded over server-sent events. The substrate engine is pure NumPy. There is no GPU. There is no orchestration framework. There is no message queue. The architecture is intentionally boring so the operator can fix anything from a phone.
All source is at github.com/psiloceyeben — HERMES-WebKit (vessel architecture), foldtoys (the 131-engine library), wander (this site), spore-animation-studio (parametric animation), and the supporting repos.
Wander Around is built and operated by one person on a $25/month server. There is no venture capital, no advertising, no data sale, no user tracking. If this is the kind of internet you want to exist, donations keep the lights on and let the cartography expand.