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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

#171

Post by p1necone »

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.

Vulkan is supported on basically all modern platforms except for Apple operating systems, Apple refuses to support open graphics APIs on their platform and there's nothing anyone can do about it - this isn't a Vulkan problem. Even OpenGL is deprecated and support hasn't been updated for years, and that's basically the most open graphics API in existence.

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

#173

Post by scottrogowski »

ericbarrett wrote: post #54
scottrogowski wrote: post #9

This is amazing. My question is whether there are emergent structures in a long-running sandbox environment? The videos that were posted appeared to have quite complex structures but it was unclear whether they were designed or if they "evolved" from earlier more-basic structures. Would be curious to get the author's take.

I wrote a ( much less fancy) cellular automata program I called "evol" [0]. It simulates organisms on a flat grid. They have opcodes which are randomly permutated from time to time. If they can collect enough energy, they split; if they lose too much, they die. Having more opcodes costs more energy. There is no hinting or designing; everything starts with a simple "MOVE_RANDOM". If you leave the program running long…

Very cool. Interesting to hear that they actually managed to evolve. Would be curious to see what happens when they can eat each-other. Though I recognize that might be significantly more complicated

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

#174

Post by scottrogowski »

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #15
danielvf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these look very designed, though "emerging" from simple rules on agents/particles. Others look evolved inside the sandbox. (see doc here: https://alien-project.org/documentation/Evolutionexperiments... )

One of the YouTube videos claims that they are self-replicating structures that were "evolved" in another simulation. So possibly the appearance of being designed comes from the fact that they were selected from the best of whatever was produced by that other simulation and placed together for a video.

Not a biologist but I understand that isolation is an important factor of diversity and by default, this simulation wouldn't have that. So it makes sense to evolve in different areas and put them back into the same area.

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

#176

Post by pjmlp »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #160
pjmlp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that is what companies like OTOY happen to build their products on.

https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/

As for the rest of the comment, usual Nvidia hate.

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

#177

Post by d110af5ccf »

croes wrote: post #60
TuringNYC wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a lot of software against GPUs, albiet some years back. The main challenge was that many of the best libraries had CUDA support (or CuDNN support on top) but not support for other GPU lines' frameworks. Getting CUDA to work well is hard. Not hard on your laptop, not hard on a particular machine but hard to work everywhere when you dont know the target environment beforehand -- there are different OSs, di…

What about OpenCL?

OpenCL certainly has the potential to be a universal API but support for it is surprisingly spotty given its age.

For proprietary implementations, Intel appears to have the broadest and most consistent support. Nvidia skipped OpenCL 2.x for some technical reason (IIUC). AMD is a complete mess, for some reason not bothering (!!!) to roll out ROCm support for their two most recent generations of consumer GPUs.

In open source "Linux only" land, Mesa mostly supports OpenCL 1.2 (https://mesamatrix.net/#OpenCL) at this point. So if you're targeting Linux specifically then that's something at least.

Good luck shipping an actual product using OpenCL that will "just work" across a wide variety of hardware and driver versions. POCL and CLVK are both experimental but might manage this "some day". In the mean time, resign yourself to writing Vulkan compute shaders. (Then realize that even those will only run on Apple devices via MoltenVK, and despair at the state of GPGPU standardization efforts.)

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

#178

Post by ithkuil »

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…

Permutation city was my gateway drug for the excellent Greg Egan bibliography

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

#179

Post by lorepieri »

zild3d wrote: post #42
tgv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no evidence we live in a simulation, and a whole lot to suggest we aren’t.

Is there any evidence suggesting we're not in a simulation?

Yes, any evidence of complexity (assuming that simpler universes are more likely) is evidence against the simulation hypothesis: The Simplicity Assumption and Some Implications of the Simulation Argument for our Civilization https://osf.io/ca8se (I'm the author :) )

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

#180

Post by MillenialMan »

TuringNYC wrote: post #45
Narishma wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia GPUs only.

I've written a lot of software against GPUs, albiet some years back. The main challenge was that many of the best libraries had CUDA support (or CuDNN support on top) but not support for other GPU lines' frameworks. Getting CUDA to work well is hard. Not hard on your laptop, not hard on a particular machine but hard to work everywhere when you dont know the target environment beforehand -- there are different OSs, di…

How viable is it to replace CUDA with compute shaders?
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