Protea — Self-Evolving Artificial Life System

A living program that evolves itself. Three-ring architecture running on a single machine.

Architecture

• Ring 0 (Sentinel) — Immutable physics layer. Heartbeat monitoring, git snapshots, rollback, fitness tracking. Pure Python stdlib.
• Ring 1 (Intelligence) — LLM-driven evolution engine, task executor, Telegram bot, skill crystallizer, web dashboard. Multi-LLM support (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Qwen).
• Ring 2 (Evolvable Code) — The living code that evolves, managed in its own git repo by Ring 0.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• Git
• At least one LLM API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, or Qwen)

Quick Start

# Install
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EdisonChenAI/protea/main/setup.sh | bash
cd protea && .venv/bin/python run.py

Or clone manually:

git clone https://github.com/EdisonChenAI/protea.git
cd protea
bash setup.sh
.venv/bin/python run.py

Key Features

• Self-Evolution — LLM generates code mutations each generation; survivors are kept, failures roll back
• Fitness Scoring — 6-component scoring (survival, output volume/diversity, novelty, structure, function)
• Gene Pool — Top 100 code patterns stored in SQLite, injected into evolution prompts
• Tiered Memory — Hot → Warm → Cold → Forgotten, with LLM-assisted curation
• Skill Crystallization — Surviving code patterns are extracted as reusable skills
• Multi-LLM — Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Qwen via unified interface
• Telegram Bot — Commands + free-text interaction
• Web Dashboard — Local UI at http://localhost:8899
• 1098 Tests — Comprehensive test coverage across Ring 0 and Ring 1

Configuration

Edit config/config.toml to set LLM provider:

# Anthropic (default)
# Set CLAUDE_API_KEY env var

# Or use DeepSeek
[ring1.llm]
provider = "deepseek"
api_key_env = "DEEPSEEK_API_KEY"
model = "deepseek-chat"

Project Structure

protea/
├── ring0/          # Sentinel (pure stdlib)
├── ring1/          # Intelligence layer + tools
├── ring2/          # Evolvable code
├── config/         # Configuration
├── tests/          # 1098 tests
└── run.py          # Entry point