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Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation

attentionmech.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation

#22

Post by vimgrinder »

talkingtab wrote: post #18

The original Boids is from Craig Reynolds, here: https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ It was a java applet (sigh) and unfortunately I have not been able to find a working version. That version based on his three "steering" mechanisms had very realistic movement. Other versions, including this one, which are good do not have that same kind of quality. They look like simulations whereas the Reynolds version, for whatever r…

oh, so i wasn't really aware that there was a original boid sim (I will check it today). mostly I saw it on some other demos and I wanted to add this behaviour of signaling boids which are far away + color code based on genome + do a simple cross-mutate. and yes you are right about fitness func.

Beyond this i was trying to add a map which effects their movement. (if you wanna check how it looks - https://x.com/attentionmech/status/1925690991555531143)

Re: Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation

#25

Post by rriley »

9dev wrote: post #15
rriley wrote: post #11

[flagged]

If you got insights from that response, why not talk about those instead of copy-pasting a wall of shallow LLM output here?

Thanks for the feedback and sorry for the lengthy post. These insights were actually quite useful for me to understand what these "genetic boids" are. I thought others might find them useful too. Lesson learned for the next time ^_^

Re: Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation

#26

Post by janzer »

talkingtab wrote: post #18

The original Boids is from Craig Reynolds, here: https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ It was a java applet (sigh) and unfortunately I have not been able to find a working version. That version based on his three "steering" mechanisms had very realistic movement. Other versions, including this one, which are good do not have that same kind of quality. They look like simulations whereas the Reynolds version, for whatever r…

Just a clarifying note, Craig Reynolds is the original researcher for Boids, and he did have a Java applet implementation in the above page. But the original Boids simulation was from 1986, almost a decade prior to Java applets.

The original paper, published in 1987, is "Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model"[1]. The implementation was done in Lisp on a Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine.

Edit: One quite interesting paragraph from the paper regarding performance:

The boid software has not been optimized for speed. But this report would be incomplete without a rough estimate of the actual performance of the system. With a flock of 80 boids, using the naive O(N²) algorithm (and so 6400 individual boid-to-boid comparisons), on a single Lisp Machine without any special hardware accelerators, the simulation ran for about 95 seconds per frame. A ten-second (300 frame) motion test took about eight hours of real time to produce.

Once again, amazing how far hardware has advanced.

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37402.37406

Re: Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation

#28

Post by vimgrinder »

anigbrowl wrote: post #27

I really like it, though I'm finding it dies consistently after about 30s (Vivaldi on an intel iMac with a decent GPU).

dies in the sense machine gets hung or all boids vanish?

EDIT: also pushed some fixes in params (allow offsprings at larger distance, etc), but basically if the boids don't end up closer, they won't reproduce and the population dies so play with that and lmk

Re: Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation

#30

Post by [deleted] »

talkingtab wrote: post #18

The original Boids is from Craig Reynolds, here: https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ It was a java applet (sigh) and unfortunately I have not been able to find a working version. That version based on his three "steering" mechanisms had very realistic movement. Other versions, including this one, which are good do not have that same kind of quality. They look like simulations whereas the Reynolds version, for whatever r…

[deleted]
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