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ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

alien-project.org

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

#141

Post by Matumio »

cwkoss wrote: post #115

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 am…

There is a 2018 paper called "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution" which is a collection of similar anecdotes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453

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

#142

Post by cwkoss »

StandardFuture wrote: post #125
cwkoss wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many artificial life simulations end up underwhelming because life is incredibly complex, and so it's very hard to simulate at scale. This ALiEn is perhaps the most advanced one I've seen, and it looks like even still they take some shortcuts (like copypasting interesting organisms from previous simulations together to create interesting interactions). What you see as a criticism of this line of research I th…

> so it's very hard to simulate at scale. But, this is a very unaddressed point. Why focus on "simulation" when mathematical formalisms & theories could be potentially even more useful? Especially when most "simulations" are running on some arbitrary set of hard-coded assumptions? > What you see as a criticism of this line of research To clarify, I was in no way criticizing ALife research. Quite the opposite. I am ac…

Ah. We'll speaking personally, mathematical formalisms & theories sound very intimidating, whereas CA-type simulations are so approachable many are 'fun toys' that kids can enjoy playing with.

A mathematically formal approach does sound potentially more useful, but I'd have no idea how to approach that sort of problem. I speculate that the venn diagram of people who want to work on these types of problems and also have the depth of formal math understanding to actually achieve it is a small handful of people who have plenty of other interesting problems to work on.

Or maybe someone has done this work successfully, but the depth of knowledge required to understand it has prevented wider awareness?

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

#143

Post by lewispollard »

vokep wrote: post #131
EMM_386 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because nothing is precisely what does exist. But nothing implies something, so my working theory is that nothing's implied opposite something is itself the first thing, then some cellular automata like progression results from similar logical self-reference and down the line our physics (and the entirety of every logical permutation of information n-dimensionally) results from that. A similar conception I've heard i…

> But nothing implies something

Put another way, nothing has absolutely no properties - including the property of being nothing, or empty. If an empty nothing lacks the property of being empty, or nothing, then something must arise.

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

#145

Post by Matumio »

sooheon wrote: post #71
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…

> It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility The universe does not owe you visibility into its origins, the lack of it does not make the hypothesis any less likely. > If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist. Sounds like the ontological argument [1], one of the worst contortions of apologia ever imagined. [1]: https…

If the universe will never leak any information about its origins, then those origins cannot affect us in any way, ever. This doesn't make any such hypothesis less likely, but it makes them irrelevant to us.

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

#146

Post by hut0 »

There's a similar project that runs right in your browser:

https://exophysics.net/

It's more simple, and more about physics than biology, but the emergent phenomena are pretty interesting nevertheless. This universe comes the closest to a life simulation: https://exophysics.net/exhibit/mordial.html [based on the Primordial Particle System, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=makaJpLvbow]

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

#147

Post by SXX »

ganzuul wrote: post #73

Is there any way to build Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 projects in Linux?

You can try this converter:

https://github.com/pavelliavonau/cmakeconverter

And also use Vcpkg for dependencies, but I guess there will be some mess with Nvidia SDKs so you'll have to hack around a bit.

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

#148

Post by PixelOfDeath »

raphlinus wrote: post #139
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Vulkan not portable? It runs on all operating systems (Windows 7+, Linux, Android, and Apple via MoltenVK) and all GPUs (AMD GCN, nVidia Kepler, Intel), and shaders (compute and rendering) are to my knowledge standardized in the portable SPIR-V bytecode. WGPU is more portable, since it can use not only Vulkan but also other APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11, but Vulkan is already very highly portable fo…

It's kinda portable, but I've had not-great experiences with MoltenVK - piet-gpu doesn't work on it, for reasons I haven't dug into. It may be practical for some people to write Vulkan-only code.

You basically complain about Vulkan not being portable enough because Apple made their ownTM Vulken-like API instead of actually supporting Vulkan. And some other people made a subset of Vulkan working on top of that.

Why don't you complain about Apple not supporting Vulkan instead?

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

#149

Post by wyager »

chimprich wrote: post #124
wyager wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of physics seems unnecessarily expensive to compute. Quantum mechanics suggest we either have nonlocality or exponential blowup, both of which cause simulation challenges. With just classical physics you don’t need to deal with that. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that make physics tractable to compute, such as the +++- metric tensor and other factors forbidding causality violations. A universe wi…

> A lot of physics seems unnecessarily expensive to compute. How do you know it's all computed? To make a convincing simulation, you just need to simulate in detail the bits that are actually being observed. Everything else that happens could just be approximated at larger and larger granularity the further it is away from an observer.

Nope, long distance entanglement collapse breaks this. You either need exponential blowup to simulate all possible eigenvalues or you need superluminal coordination.

There isn’t actually an observed/unobserved distinction in physics. Unless you mean the simulation is specifically targeting humans, which is a vastly more complicated proposal.

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

#150

Post by xaedes »

Reminds me of ParticleLife (for example [1]), which has much simpler, but more random rules. There also emerge lots of interesting organism, but I rarely see replicators.

I used this as inpiration and to learn about Unity ECS and made a 3D version with WebGL support [2]; native builds obviously have much better performance. But it is all CPU-only. Anyway. What I found very interesting is dynamically switching between 2d and 3d. Most organisms survive the dimensional increase or reduction and just reconfigure itself to a similar structure.

[1] https://fnky.github.io/particle-life/ [2] https://particlelife-3d-unity-ecs.github.io/

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