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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

#181

Post by lorepieri »

LandR wrote: post #70
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…

Isn't this all assuming the simulation is running on a "computer" in a universe like ours. Couldn't the universe where the simulation runs be so entirely different to ours that computing all that stuff is just easy.

Even if it's easy, simple simulations would still dominate the space of all possible simulations if the resources of the simulators are finite. So simpler simulations are more likely. (https://osf.io/ca8se , disclaimer I'm the author)

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

#182

Post by lorepieri »

cwkoss wrote: post #117
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is actually possible :) (with some assumption on the distribution of the simulations) Complex sims are less likely, so the likelihood of increasing optional complexity of our sim should be slim, for instance interstellar travel. It's still unsolved how much unlikely, but if you have a large enough increase in complexity (say interstellar travel over billions of light years) you will hit sims which are unlikely enough.

(https://osf.io/ca8se, I'm the author)

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

#183

Post by ShamelessC »

hut0 wrote: post #146

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 ]

https://exophysics.net/exhibit/ogneron.html

Pretty cool! I see some rare behaviors like maybe there is a weak magnetic property and certain combinations of particles are more prone to it than others? Trying to rationalize this behavior I see after about a minute where some "molecules" seem to start trailing others.

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

#184

Post by lorepieri »

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…

I'm working on writing a paper along those lines. I do believe that the answer to "why there is something rather than nothing?" may be: actually nothing is the only thing that exist, but its instability creates our apparent reality trough a self-referential observer-observed reality loop. I would love to chat, use my research email.

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

#186

Post by Trex_Egg »

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…

This is way cooler than what I am doing now to learn a language.

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

#187

Post by lorepieri »

TchoBeer wrote: post #119
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…

What would it look like for math to not exist?

Does science fiction exists? Or Pokemon? In case your view is that they don't, you may argue similarly that math is a human made construct (which happen to work well to describe our universe, but it may be just survivorship bias as we use in physics only the math that works. For instance we discard imaginary solutions to classical motion equations). I do believe it is the right view, math is a man made "language" inspired by physics which is more fundamental.

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

#188

Post by maeln »

MillenialMan wrote: post #180
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…

How viable is it to replace CUDA with compute shaders?

Technically it is entirely viable. Vulkan/OpenGL compute shaders offer more or less a 1:1 equivalent to every CUDA features. It is more of an usability issue. CUDA has been design to be a GPGPU API from the get go and, therefor, tend to be "easier" to use. OpenCL could have been a better replacement, but the API was really not on par with CUDA when it comes to usability. SYCL looks like finally a good answer by the Khronos group but it is so late. You already have a lot of people who know how to use CUDA, a lot of learning resources, etc ...

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

#189

Post by maeln »

hyperluz wrote: post #44
Narishma wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia GPUs only.

What would be the best alternative? OpenCL? Vulkan?

Nowaday I think it would be SYCL. It use the same kind of "same source" API that CUDA propose and is portable. Technically it can even use a CUDA backend.
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