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I wonder how... If it's all generated real-time, there must be a mathematical foundation that is translated into worlds.

I'm trying to figure out how it would all work... I could understand how nothing can ever be stored on disk if the universe was not interfered with. As in, the universe created is like a "artistic rendition" of the Mandelbrot set. That's a cool idea, but that would have to be persistent.

So when he destroyed that asteroid at the beginning of the video, does it remain destroyed for the remainder of the universe? or is it discarded when he is out of range? Can you permanently alter a planet's ecosystem by removing all Colbisions?

I think it contains more prebuilt parts than he's letting on. There were wings, legs, tails, heads and horns on those animals, and there was grass, rain and mud, all approximated using standard computer graphics techniques. The rest is probably seeded pseudo-random generation, which goes all the way back to Elite.

Within those constraints, it does look technically impressive. Good, enduring gameplay? Not so sure. If the naming mechanic is the only point, and the universe is so big that you won't see other people, then the interaction will only take place on the leaderboards. Why don't those animals react to you in some way to make things a bit more interesting?

These are things they could still work on, if they have the right mindset.