Electronic Life Makes Evolving Art

brilanon writes "Good news! On Sept 4, critterdrug, the a-life lab for the twenty-teens, was updated to make generating a species almost trivial. A new video shows semi-random artificial animals gaining neurons and synapses as they compete to draw a gradient on an animated shared canvas which constitutes 1024 frames spread through time. The canvas is a 10-megabyte digital background for the lossy neural nets that populate the world. What you get are cellular automata run by psychic neural nets that are bound by the rules of a survival contest with physics. Features implementations of telepathy, Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields and five types of drugs. The key assignments have changed since critterding; check the changelog on the web page for the new ones. Happy hacking!"

Comments

Re:What is it?

[emurphy42]

It's semi-random computer-simulated artificial animals moving, eating, breeding, evolving and surviving (or not). The link to critterding doesn't directly state this, but gives enough information that you can reasonably figure it out:

How the program works

Critters are informed by sensors:

• if their head touches food unit
• if their head touches another critter
• if they are able to procreate
• about their energy state
• about their age
• about the state of their joints
• what the world looks like (RGBA vision)

Critters can make use of the following motor neurons (actions):

• bend joint
• bend joint in other direction
• eat
• procreate

At default, the program sets up a small world with a relatively large amount of food units and keeps throwing in critters with randomly generated brains and bodies.

(picture omitted)

After a while, one of these idiot critters will unavoidably be good enough to maintain a small population:

(picture omitted)

Slowly but surely, their behaviour will become a lot less random as they demonstrate increasingly better survival skills:

(picture and video omitted)