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>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…
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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?
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 with closed timelike curves becomes very expensive to compute because you usually have to use implicit solvers that are slow and might not even converge, corresponding to various time travel paradoxes.
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A simple artifical life / cellular automaton framework would be a great demo for portable compute shaders. I'm looking at this as a potential starting point in my compute-shader-101 project. If someone is interested in coding something up, please get in touch.
I'd love to help with this. I've been experimenting with rustgpu + wgpu, so I'd personally go there first probably.
[8] https://github.com/googlefonts/compute-shader-101/pull/8
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.
If you leave the program running long enough, they do actually evolve different behavior. Specifically, they will learn to recognize that there are other lifeforms in a direction and then move the opposite direction, reducing competition over the fixed amount of energy in a cell. You can actually see the population density rise when this happens. Since the grid wraps, you will generally get them "flowing" in one direction, cooperatively.
The world is simple and boring and it doesn't have graphics. Also, since the naive "Dna"/opcodes I chose use branching and random number generation, it's very slow and can't be simulated on a GPU.
Fun project nevertheless. The last few months, I've been slowly rewriting it in Rust and adding more stuff like terrain height. Haven't published the Rust version yet as it's incomplete—got hung up on the poor state of its terminal libraries.
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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…
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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…
Why not use the Nvidia docker runtime and put your application in a container?
>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…
This book is absolutely fantastic. Egan is a magnificent writer.
Reminds me of my favorite programming game that no one has heard of: http://grobots.sourceforge.net (Old video of grobots in action at https://youtu.be/BLXKedZHls4?t=801 ) Alien looks awesome!
There is an old artificial life simulator (darwinbots http://wiki.darwinbots.com/w/Main_Page ) that is inspired by grobots-like programming games. Each organism is driven by its own code that can mutate randomly at each reproduction. I've been trying to produce a web version of it. This is where I got so far (before more or less desisting): http://darwinjs.herokuapp.com/
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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…