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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

#71

Post by sooheon »

phkahler wrote: post #61
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more likely than you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

Not really. If we're in a simulation that just begs the question - what is the "real" universe that the simulation is running in. It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility. No more satisfying that "where was god before he created the universe?" The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is suffici…

> 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

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

#72

Post by sooheon »

wyager wrote: post #52
zild3d wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

That's like a sim saying that their world would be impossible to run on the desktop in their simulated living room. That is tautologically true.

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

#74

Post by ronyfadel »

wyager wrote: post #52
zild3d wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Maybe the simulation isn’t optimized, but how do the unnecessarily expensive bits negate the theory that it all is in fact a simulation?

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

#76

Post by jdonaldson »

Wanted to give a shot out to Larry Yeager who wrote software for this all the way back in the mid nineties : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld

He was a professor of mine in grad school, he also did visual effects for The Last Starfighter, and the early work on character recognition in the Apple Newton. Cool dude.

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

#78

Post by shakna »

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 feels pretty stagnant. Showstopping bugs staying open for years. Card support is incredibly spotty. Feature support isn't even near parity with CUDA.

This despite v3.0 being released just last year... And completely breaking the API.

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

#79

Post by Udik »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #59
Udik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Nicely done! Very fluid.

Thanks!

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

#80

Post by grp000 »

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.

One of the videos mentioned they were evolved in a different simulation.
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