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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

#151

Post by danwills »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #5

Looks like Conway's game of life next generation.

Definitely a kind of cellular automata, I like seeing a different version of that than Game of Life.

I don't think you could really call this a cellular automata, as that's defined by the cellular-neighbourhood-processing update rule. To put it another way, this looks like a 'vector' simulation (or automata) compared to GoL's 'raster' update.

There are certainly a lot of other fascinating cellar automata though! Even within 2-state-2d-totalistic (the class GoL is from) there's loads to see and lots of surprises! Well worth exploring! (there's an app called 'golly' that's good for that, and it's cousin 'ready' does related (also 'raster') 'reaction-diffusion' simulations.)

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

#152

Post by arrow7000 »

leblancfg wrote: post #95
abra0 wrote: post #25

>The Autoverse is an artificial life simulator based on a cellular automaton complex enough to represent the substratum of an artificial chemistry. It is deterministic, internally consistent and vaguely resembles real chemistry. Tiny environments, simulated in the Autoverse and filled with populations of a simple, designed lifeform, Autobacterium lamberti, are maintained by a community of enthusiasts obsessed with ge…

Thank you for letting me find my next read! Loved Egan's Diaspora years ago, looking forward to this one.

Diaspora is one of my all time favourite books

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

#153

Post by danwills »

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…

Although they could call this an automata, I think it's incorrect to call it a CA as it's not cell-neighbourhood based:

"A cellular automaton consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as on and off "

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton?wprov=sfla1

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

#155

Post by thomashop »

Matumio wrote: post #145
sooheon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If we are in a simulation and this simulation obeys similar constraints to our computational models, we can test hypotheses on the basis of information theory. Or possibly find error-correction codes encoded in string theory as some quantum physicists have suggested.

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

#156

Post by cwkoss »

Matumio wrote: post #141
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

Karl Sims is a nice Aptronym for someone who studies evolution in physics simulations.

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

#157

Post by protomikron »

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…

That sounds like a neat idea.

I too implemented GOL at some point (when I had a look at SDL) and for fun changed the (boolean) game field to integers that I mapped to grayscale (and later RGB). So instead of killing/giving birth to cells you just decrease/increase their integer value. The result looks like a spreading fungus (with the classic horizontal/vertical/diagonal patterns) which can be very chaotic when numbers start to overflow and underflow.

It's a really fun and engaging way to play with 2d graphics and simulation.

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

#159

Post by cellular »

protomikron wrote: post #157
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…

That sounds like a neat idea. I too implemented GOL at some point (when I had a look at SDL) and for fun changed the (boolean) game field to integers that I mapped to grayscale (and later RGB). So instead of killing/giving birth to cells you just decrease/increase their integer value. The result looks like a spreading fungus (with the classic horizontal/vertical/diagonal patterns) which can be very chaotic when numbe…

Definitely! I made some too:

https://youtu.be/gaFKqOBTj9w

There are a few videos (not just this one) where I tweaked the rules arbitrarily but got realty interesting behavior!

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

#160

Post by CyberDildonics »

pjmlp wrote: post #39
tormeh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Intel. Being Nvidia-only is not very good from an accessibility point-of-view. It means that only ML researchers and about 60% of gamers can run this.

And most people in Hollywood using rendering engines like Optix.

No they don't. Also optix isn't a renderer, it just traces rays and runs shaders on the ray hits on nvidia cards. Memory limitations and immature renderers hinder gpu rendering. The makers of gpu renderers want you to think it's what most companies use, but it is not.

Also Hollywood is a city and most computer animation is not done there. The big movie studios aren't even in Hollywood except for paramount.

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