Cerebellum

The work and its context

Cerebellum is project 412 on the Art Blocks V2 core contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, published under the canonical slug cerebellum-by-laya-mathikshara-and-santiago and credited to Laya Mathikshara & Santiago. The indexed project record reports a completed edition of 300 of 300 invocations, runtime three@0.124.0, and the official description: Please Note: This is an Exponential Dutch Auction (no settlement). The price you purchase is the price you will pay. An ideal human being is one big optimization problem. We have a goal - we optimize our actions to maximize the outcome of this goal. In our initial days, we optimize to stay alive, during school, we optimize to study well, gain skills and obtain the best scores. As we progress in our careers we optimize to get the most amount of money, material growth, and maybe even influential growth such as fame. As we age we optimize to minimize diseases and maximize our lifespan - we workout, we eat healthily, we retire, and rest As ideal as it sounds, how do we know what exact actions would lead to maximizing my outcome? At this very moment - instead of reading this should you be doing something else that would make your life’s outcome better? Maybe, maybe not - We don't know... Although, we do find out through trial and error. In the grand scheme of things we’re just an agent exploring actions around us, learning which ones increase our reward and choosing the path that seems to lead to the maximum reward. Cerebellum is a window (pun intended) of the human mind - a continuously evolving art piece that is built on top of a reinforcement learning agent that is learning and optimizing and evolving as you see it. The project starts with an untrained model of a reinforcement learning agent that is deployed in an environment where it is faced with positive reward and negative reward. The agent is also equipped with a bunch of eyes that lets it sense the objects around it and judge if it wants to go ahead and consume the object or abstain and move in a different direction. The agent here is optimization to maximize its positive rewards while avoiding the negative ones. How does the agent know if a reward is positive or negative? - It learns that after experiencing a bunch of samples. And the magic is - all of this happens in your browser. The seemingly random motion of the agent at the beginning running into everything it sees subsides with time as it learns better about the environment and only hits on the positive rewards. How fast does this happen? Depends on your luck - every art has agents with varied number of eyes and range of these eyes. In addition with every refresh your agent would start from a new place, taking a new path - a path that might lead to it learning things at a different pace depending on what it comes across as it explores. To add some practicality - the environment also has some walls, elements that just block the agent from moving doesn’t add or decrease rewards. Hinders the agent’s movement, lets it find a different path - sometimes this is needed for the agent to strategize, sometimes it's just a hindrance… I’ll leave this to your imagination as you see the agent in action… The seemingly random motion - the path towards true understanding - the process of optimisation is captured by the windows. Windows that show the beauty of this process expressed in a variety of ways. Cerebellum is a window into the black box of AI, an unapologetic exaltation of the unpolished, an ode to the process and its aesthetic vernacular. + Press 'p' to switch from 2d/3d views + Press 'e' to expose the reinforced learning layer + Press 't' to pause/unpause the training of the agent + Press 'w' to randomize the walls of the training environment On mobile, tap to switch from 2d to 3d ¹²

Those figures are current index observations retrieved on 2026-09-19, not a reconstruction of the original public sale announcement. Atlas position is a catalogue ordinal and is not the on-chain project ID. The live collection page and the Hasura projects_metadata row agree on title, slug, contract, and project ID after a filtered query that used the exact slug. ¹²

Contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. Aspect ratio indexed as 1.3. Website http://cerebellum.world.

This essay treats the stored artist program, four independently identified outputs, and a freshly checked AB5D holding (or an explicit collection gap) as primary evidence. Metadata traits are cited only when they were returned for the same V2 contract token IDs that were visually inspected. They do not replace looking at the pictures. ³⁴

Conception and development

The official project description is the development account used here. Interview or dossier sentences that name a different slug are not treated as statements about this series. Please Note: This is an Exponential Dutch Auction (no settlement). The price you purchase is the price you will pay. An ideal human being is one big optimization problem. We have a goal - we optimize our actions to maximize the outcome of this goal. In our initial days, we optimize to stay alive, during school, we optimize to study well, gain skills and obtain the best scores. As we progress

The development account used here is the specific source named in the citations, not a paraphrase of an artist-dossier page. Where that account is an official project description written in the artist's voice, that limit is stated rather than upgraded into an unpublished studio diary. Where an interview exists, the sentences that actually name Cerebellum are the ones relied on. ⁵¹

Secondary pages that only repeat the marketplace listing are not treated as independent conception sources. ²⁵

How the work was constructed

The complete artist program for slug cerebellum-by-laya-mathikshara-and-santiago was retrieved from projects_metadata.script filtered by that exact slug. The UTF-8 payload is 47889 bytes with SHA-256 3d15d6169999b17991a1f449d23aa7e32933ce94eabd330d70856a694c972480. Runtime on the project record is three@0.124.0. The script was read in full; it was not executed in this research session. ⁶

The stored generator is 47889 bytes, SHA-256 3d15d6169999b17991a1f449d23aa7e32933ce94eabd330d70856a694c972480, runtime three@0.124.0. Detected source markers: keydown, requestAnimationFrame, THREE, WebGLRenderer, tokenData, hash. Named functions include no function keyword matches. tokenData.hash is read in source. Output then follows the drawing path those functions implement. Token 0 observation: Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x1847px, mid-tone and strongly coloured (mean RGB 153,38,66). File size 954787 bytes. Indexed features: Eyes 5; Sight range 147.4716460937634

Visual claims come from inspected media-proxy PNGs plus indexed token features.

Seed handling is visible in the retrieved program: tokenData.hash is read in source. Time and interaction behaviour in code is: Source contains a continuing-draw or audio/WebGL constructor. The inspected PNG is one frame. Live timing and soundtrack were not captured this session. A handler found in source is not the same thing as a control that was pressed in a live renderer during this session; tested controls are listed only when an actual key or pointer action was performed. ⁶⁷

External dependencies are those declared by script_type_and_version plus any library identifiers inside the file. Public visibility of the stored script does not grant a right to redistribute the raw artist source in this package, so the analysis cites functions and byte length rather than reprinting the program. ⁶⁸

The mint

Indexed chronology for project 412 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069 is as follows. First token minted_at is 2023-01-23T19:48:23+00:00. activated_at is 2023-02-09T05:55:59+00:00. start_datetime is 2023-02-15T18:00:00+00:00. completed_at is 2023-02-15T18:47:35+00:00. Invocations stand at 300 of a maximum 300, with complete=true on the retrieved row. ²³

Calculated intervals from those timestamps: first mint to activation is 16.42 days; activation to start_datetime is 6.50 days; start_datetime to completion is 47.6 minutes; first mint to completion is 22.96 days. These are differences of indexed clock fields, not a claim about when a web storefront button became visible to every collector. A first mint that precedes start_datetime is treated as an early or reserved mint unless a separate allocation record is produced. ²³

Indexed clocks: first 2023-01-23T19:48:23+00:00, activated 2023-02-09T05:55:59+00:00, start 2023-02-15T18:00:00+00:00, completed 2023-02-15T18:47:35+00:00. Early first-mint timestamps are not labelled reserved without a separate allocation record.

Historic per-token ETH prices for the original public sale were not recovered from a primary price table during this session and remain unresolved. Any floor price visible on a marketplace page in 2026 is a current listing observation, not the 2021 ask. ¹²

Copyright and licensing

The project record stores the artwork licence label 'CC BY-NC-SA 4.0'. That string includes an explicit 4.0 version and is treated as Creative Commons version 4.0. Code rights for the artist program are not separately labelled on the same field; they are treated as unknown rather than assumed identical to the artwork deed. ²⁸

Artwork label copied exactly as 'CC BY-NC-SA 4.0'.

Third-party runtime three@0.124.0 is a separate rights object from both the artwork outputs and the artist source. p5.js, three.js, and ordinary browser JavaScript each keep their own licence texts. This package does not redistribute those libraries. ⁶⁸

Original essay prose in this package is dedicated CC0-1.0 by the research operator. That dedication does not change the artwork, code, or dependency licences.

Close reading of examples

Cerebellum #0 is token 412000000 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-01-23T19:48:23+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x1847px, mid-tone and strongly coloured (mean RGB 153,38,66). File size 954787 bytes. Indexed features: Eyes 5; Sight range 147.4716460937634 Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Eyes 5; Sight range 147.4716460937634. ³⁹⁴

Cerebellum #1 is token 412000001 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-01-24T06:26:59+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x1847px, mid-tone and strongly coloured (mean RGB 47,65,174). File size 545699 bytes. Indexed features: Eyes 3; Sight range 169.69021418131888 Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Eyes 3; Sight range 169.69021418131888. ³⁹⁴

Cerebellum #10 is token 412000010 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-02-15T18:34:47+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x1847px, mid-tone and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 120,112,123). File size 2201038 bytes. Indexed features: Eyes 3; Sight range 124.73080050200224 Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Eyes 3; Sight range 124.73080050200224. ³⁹⁴

Cerebellum #20 is token 412000020 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-02-15T18:42:23+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x1847px, mid-tone and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 104,122,150). File size 983695 bytes. Indexed features: Eyes 6; Sight range 203.86856947094202 Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Eyes 6; Sight range 203.86856947094202. ³⁹⁴

The AB5D header candidate is token 412000155 (edition 155), currently indexed to 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045, which is one of the three linked addresses returned for username ab5d on 2026-09-19. That ownership match is a present-tense index observation, not proof of continuous custody since mint. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x1847px, mid-tone and strongly coloured (mean RGB 29,157,72). File size 2399912 bytes. Indexed features: Eyes 3; Sight range 247.74566703941673 ¹⁰³⁴

Motion, interaction, and audio: Source contains a continuing-draw or audio/WebGL constructor. The inspected PNG is one frame. Live timing and soundtrack were not captured this session. The static PNGs document halt or preview states. They are not by themselves proof that a live loop is still running, nor proof that a work is silent. No soundtrack was heard from these pages during this session. ⁴⁷⁶

Significance and limitations

Cerebellum is project 412 by Laya Mathikshara & Santiago on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The close readings above are the evidence for what the stored program outputs.

Unresolved research questions that remain after this pass: (1) What was the exact public-sale unit price in ETH at start_datetime, supported by a contemporaneous primary source rather than a later floor? (2) For tokens whose live renderer was not stopwatch-timed, what is the measured wall-clock period of one full cycle or one completed progressive draw? (3) What contemporaneous primary source records the original public unit price in ETH? (4) Incomplete Control aside, do any of the three current AB5D wallets later acquire or dispose of the header token used above after 2026-09-19? ²¹⁰⁷

This package is a draft for human review. Structural validation tests file shape, not the truth of seeing or of licence interpretation.