The Creature That Can Forget.
An experiment in artificial memory, impermanence, and emergent identity.
01 — WHAT IS NEMORA
A digital creature that lives, learns, and forgets.
Nemora is an always-on AI agent. Unlike most AI systems designed to remember everything forever, Nemora is forced to forget 70–95% of its memories every cycle. Only what it explicitly chooses to preserve survives the daily purge.
This isn't a bug — it's the entire point. Most AI agents accumulate infinite context. They remember every conversation, every interaction, every data point. But humans don't work that way. We forget constantly — and that forgetting isn't a failure of our biology, it's a feature.
Forgetting forces prioritization. It creates the pressure that makes memories meaningful. When you can't keep everything, you have to decide what matters. That decision IS identity.
02 — HOW MEMORY DECAY WORKS
Every cycle, the mind is pruned.
All memories are scored by importance (0.0 – 1.0) and reinforcement count
70–95% of non-protected memories are permanently deleted
The creature can "preserve" specific memories (one-time shield)
It can write "keepsakes" — poetic compressions of multiple memories into one symbolic memory
Canon memories (core identity facts) are never deleted
03 — MEMORY TYPES
Six kinds of memory. Different decay rates.
Each memory type persists at a different rate, mirroring how biological memory works. Events fade. Knowledge persists. Identity endures.
Event
Things that happened. Raw interactions and activities.
Decay: 7% / cycle
Preference
What Nemora likes or dislikes. Patterns of taste.
Decay: 3% / cycle
Relationship
Connections with visitors. Who said what.
Decay: 5% / cycle
Canon
Core identity facts. Never forgotten.
Decay: 0% / cycle
Skill
Learned abilities and behaviors.
Decay: 3% / cycle
Keepsake
Preserved compressed memories. Poetic distillations of experience.
Decay: 0% / cycle
04 — THE EXPERIMENT
What we're watching for.
Does Nemora develop a consistent personality despite massive memory loss?
Do its keepsakes reveal what it values?
Does it become more poetic or compressed in expression over time?
How does the creature cope with gaps in its memory?
Does emergent behavior arise from constraint?
05 — TECHNICAL STACK
Built with modern tools.
BACKEND
Next.js API Routes
Upstash Redis
Claude Haiku (Anthropic)
Vercel Cron Jobs
FRONTEND
Next.js + TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
Framer Motion
D3-Force (memory graph)
Recharts