---
title: "World models: Labs, StrucTime"
description: "The world model line of the AEON Systems research programme: representing a system as it changes, predicting its state, and the yardsticks that measure it."
canonical: https://structime.com/en/research/world-models/
language: en
last_modified: 2026-10-21
publisher: "AEON Systems (SIREN 993102821)"
source_format: html
---

# Representing a system that changes.

> The world model line of the AEON Systems research programme: representing a system as it changes, predicting its state, and the yardsticks that measure it.

Source : https://structime.com/en/research/world-models/
Publisher: AEON Systems (SIREN 993102821) · StrucTime

Labs · World

The question

## Predicting without knowing the equations.

An installation follows physical laws we do not fully know, and never fully measure. The field has a name: dynamical systems reconstruction, recovering the rule of evolution from the traces a system leaves behind.

Predicting the next instant is easy. The useful result is a trajectory that stays plausible far ahead, once no measurement comes to correct it.

Yardsticks

## What we measure against.

Three references we did not write. A model that does not clear them has learned nothing, whatever else it does.

### The Kalman filter

Optimal by construction when the system is known. It cannot be gamed: a method that does not match it on that ground cannot claim to do better elsewhere.

### The seasonal naive method

Replaying the previous period as is. Plenty of models fail to beat it, and that is the first cut.

### Context parroting

Copying back what just happened. A method that adds nothing to it has memorised without understanding.

Limits

## What is not solved.

### Size is not enough.

In this family, published work shows that a bigger model is not reliably a better one. The models that hold up are small.

### Hidden state stays out of reach.

Recovering what you do not measure, on a system whose equations are unknown: nobody manages it today, ourselves included.

### Stability in high dimension.

Over a long horizon a simulated trajectory ends up diverging. We have not measured that properly yet.

## The product that depends on it.

Furnace explores thousands of futures of a site. Our world model lets it explore more of them, faster.