BOOTSTRAP

Something is sitting across from you. It is patient, intelligent, and completely wordless. You have 24 transmissions to teach it 16 words. The rule: you may only define a word using words it already knows. You start with 73 gestures — things you can act out with your own body. HOT, HARD, WET, MOVE, FALL, WANT, GOOD, NOT. That's it. So when it points at FIRE, you type: HOT BURN PAIN. It thinks. It ranks every word in its head. It picks. FIRE ████████████████ 71% SUN ████ 14% STONE ██ 8% DOG █ 4% Get it right and FIRE enters the language forever — and becomes a tool you can use in every definition after that. This is the whole game: you are bootstrapping a vocabulary from nothing, one word at a time. ### The part people don't expect If it guesses wrong, it doesn't shrug and forget. It learns the wrong word. Permanently. Try to teach it BREAD, define it carelessly, and it walks away knowing WAR. You can use WAR now — but BREAD is still out there, untaught, and the alien is walking around with a head full of confident errors. ### How it escalates - **Concrete** first — STONE, DOG, SNOW, SEA. Easy, physical, gesture-able. - **Objects** next — HAMMER, BRIDGE, MIRROR, SHIP. Now you need the earlier words. - **Abstract** last — SHAME, TOMORROW, FREEDOM, WISDOM, BETRAYAL. There is no gesture for these. You have to build them out of stones and fire. `NOT` is your only power tool. ### Details - 184 concepts: 73 gestures + 111 words waiting in the void - ~15 minutes per run - Runs entirely offline in one HTML file — no install, no server, no tracking - A "SHARE RUN" button copies a scorecard of your best and worst moments - At the end, the alien tries to teach *you* a word using only what you gave it ### Sample disasters recorded in testing tried BREAD → it learned WAR tried MILK → it learned STAR tried LEAF → it learned ANGER Those are features. Made as a gift. Tell me what it taught you instead.