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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

#191

Post by EMM_386 »

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…

> A similar conception I've heard is that its like something and nothing, at the beginning of time, made a bet whether there'd be something or nothing

The problem is that nothing can't make bets.

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

#192

Post by carlob »

cwkoss wrote: post #156
Matumio wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though Charles would have been better...

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

#193

Post by CyberDildonics »

pjmlp wrote: post #176
CyberDildonics wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Octane is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. This is not what film is rendered with. It is mostly combinations of PRman, Arnold or proprietary renderers, all software.

I don't know where you are getting "nvidia hate", studios that use linux usually use nvidia, mostly because of the drivers.

None of this changes that optix is not a renderer.

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

#194

Post by ericbarrett »

scottrogowski wrote: post #173
ericbarrett wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ve been thinking about that for the rewrite! Maybe some chance to incorporate snippets of opcodes from the consumed.

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

#195

Post by sudosysgen »

maeln wrote: post #189
hyperluz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used it with a CUDA backend, it does work.

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

#196

Post by TchoBeer »

lorepieri wrote: post #187
TchoBeer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ins…

If that's your view that's fine, but it's not the view of GP.

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

#199

Post by nitrogen »

eloff wrote: post #162
cwkoss wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal with this project was to be able to seed the world with a single proto-organism and have two distinct species - one predator and one prey - evolve to create a stable ecosystem. I eventually localized food sources and added a bunch of additional rules, but was never able to realize this goal. I think for predator-prey relationships to evolve in my system it would have required sensory organs and methods to rea…

In the real world what prevents this outcome? Humans aside. Because it's uncommon. Ecosystem diversity? Pathogens?

Sometimes the prey can hide?

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

#200

Post by mLuby »

p_j_w wrote: post #85
LandR wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone saying it would be computationally expensive to simulate our universe is failing to put their mind outside of the box of our universe. Imagine for a moment that there's a universe which compares to our universe similarly to how our world compares to one inside of Conway's Game of life. Granted, this scenario doesn't provide us with anything we can take action on, but the idea that we're in a simulation at al…

Some self-replicating "creature" in Conway's Game of Life could rowhammer the machine it runs in such that the creature (or a copy of it) now exists outside the Game and is able to replicate across the machine and maybe even across the network. If it takes control of a robot, you could argue it's "escaped" its simulation and now exists in our physical world.

The odds of all that happening without it being prevented are all but zero.

We have a better chance that one of the simulators grows attached and—against protocol—decides to uplift us from the simulation into a form where we can directly communicate with them.

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