Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

alien-project.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 217 posts

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#111

Post by tgv »

p_j_w wrote: post #97
tgv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you only have to assume physics totally different from ours, and we can’t observe it. Isn’t that a bit of a weak point? And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years?

>you only have to assume physics totally different from ours You don't have to assume anything is true if you don't want to, but if you want to consider whether we're living in a simulation, it's probably worth considering. >And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years? First, it's billions of years in our time. Second, what's the point of Conway's Game of Life?

> You don't have to assume anything is true if you don't want to, but if you want to consider whether we're living in a simulation, it's probably worth considering.

Which, for me, is a dead end. It's the same as assuming there's a God, except the moral implications are worse.

> First, it's billions of years in our time.

So, if billions of years of our time fly by like your average simulation run in "their" universe, the simulation can't be very meaningful to them. And it makes the distance between our and "their" physics even larger.

> what's the point of Conway's Game of Life?

None, and that's why nobody runs one with 10^120 cells for billions of years. And if somebody did, the result would be incomprehensible. The gap between us and our creators must then be incomprehensible for us. All this is so outlandish, that the word "likely" shouldn't be anywhere near this discussion.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#112

Post by sooheon »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #109
sooheon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's why my favorite way of reading him is via his short stories. Just enough to get the big idea across and not get lost in too much detail.

Could you recommend one or two of these short stories? Thank you!

Pick up Axiomatic, try the first story (The Infinite Assassin) and see if it grabs you. It's got the best parts of something like Snow Crash, which drops you in without much exposition, and lets the visuals/action lead. Learning to Be Me from the same collection really stood out to me, it's a unique take on the "uploading your consciousness" trope.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#113

Post by sooheon »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #109
sooheon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's why my favorite way of reading him is via his short stories. Just enough to get the big idea across and not get lost in too much detail.

Could you recommend one or two of these short stories? Thank you!

Into Darkness was another great one from Axiomatic. Also great action, and a seriously intense brooding atmosphere.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#114

Post by jordibc »

jdonaldson wrote: post #76

Wanted to give a shot out to Larry Yeager who wrote software for this all the way back in the mid nineties : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld He was a professor of mine in grad school, he also did visual effects for The Last Starfighter, and the early work on character recognition in the Apple Newton. Cool dude.

Yes, cool dude indeed! Glad you mention him, I was thinking of him when I saw this article. He visited the group where I was doing my PhD many years ago and also gave a fantastic talk on evolution, learning, and artificial life -- I was quite impressed. He has some cool stuff in his website too (http://shinyverse.org/larryy/).

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#115

Post by cwkoss »

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split among the offspring, with each offspring's 'dna' values set to one of the parent's +/- 5%.

As I was developing this, I hadn't figured out how I wanted to do food yet, so as an easy first step, I just had a constant amount of energy that was split amongst all organisms on the screen. Lots of little dots buzzing around, was kind of neat but nothing too special. I left it to run overnight.

When I came back I was very surprised: previously i was running at about 30FPS - now it was running at about 4 seconds per frame. The screen was filled with dense expanding circles of tiny slow organisms emanating from where organisms had mated and nothing else.

My simulation evolved to outsmart my simple food algorithm: when food is divided equally among all organisms, the best strategy is to use minimal energy and maximize offspring count. I had populated the world with a default offspring count of ~5 and they had evolved to the tens of thousands. The more offspring an organism had, the greater the amount of the energy pool would go to their offspring.

It was a very cool "Life, uh, finds a way" moment - that such a simple toy simulation of evolution was able to find an unanticipated optimal solution to the environment I created overnight was very humbling and gave me a lot of respect for the power of evolution.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#117

Post by cwkoss »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27
dezmou wrote: post #18

Imagine if our real world is juste some github project

It's more likely than you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

It is impossible to know the likelihood as we have no other points of comparison.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#118

Post by StandardFuture »

Could someone explain the obsessive devotion to doing all Artificial "Life" research in terms of Cellular Automata? If you could supply the mathematical reasoning for this, I would be very interested in hearing the answer.

And preferably an answer that goes beyond just saying that Von Neumann used Cellular Automata in his ALife research.

Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of life then I would also be interested in learning of these.

All in all, I find these procedurally generated art pieces to be rather underwhelming in any serious attempt or study of what artifical life is/can be.

> digital organisms and evolution

This is a claim without definition of what a non-biological organism even is. Could we just claim that any CA, any program is "living" while it is running?

I would love to see some formality before claims are made in this area.

EDIT: After watching the "Planet Gaia" video [0], I feel even more like the excitement about this is no different than the excitement for a video game and not for actual scientific progress. Cool code and cool visuals. Very little in the way of understanding life better.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9R6zrdl6jM

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#119

Post by TchoBeer »

EMM_386 wrote: post #82
phkahler wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If we're in a simulation that just begs the question - what is the "real" universe that the simulation is running in. It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility. No more satisfying that "where was god before he created the universe?" The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is suffici…

> The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist. This then leads to how does math exist instead of nothing? Math is a concept, and if concepts exist then that is not "nothing". Many people confuse "nothing" with the vacuum of space and particles appearing out of nowhere. In this case, we have something (space, vacuums, an…

What would it look like for math to not exist?

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#120

Post by dragonwriter »

StandardFuture wrote: post #118

Could someone explain the obsessive devotion to doing all Artificial "Life" research in terms of Cellular Automata? If you could supply the mathematical reasoning for this, I would be very interested in hearing the answer. And preferably an answer that goes beyond just saying that Von Neumann used Cellular Automata in his ALife research. Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of…

> Could someone explain the obsessive devotion to doing all Artificial "Life" research in terms of Cellular Automata?

Uh, it doesn't exist. Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model.

> Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of life then I would also be interested in learning of these.

https://avida.devosoft.org/

Post reply on HN