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!"

Re:What is it?

[sakdoctor]

So what is it? [youtube.com]

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 [sourceforge.net] 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)

Re:What is it?

[Tacvek]

The thing is though that it takes an awfully long time to evolve a creature that even moves randomly, eats food when touching it, and procreate when reasonable.

But until you get to that point, you have no chance of seeing interesting behaviors like using the eye to find food or avoiding predators.

IIRC, about 6 months ago, a post to the critterding mailing list indicated that besides the program creator, only one other person had managed to evolve a creature that would actively look for food.

Here's a species that does use the eye

[brilanon]

It's not too slow right now. Let me give you a species and a profile to use

http://ansistego.sf.net/6600-generation-foodotropes-for-critterdrug.tgz [sf.net] critters
http://ansistego.sf.net/foodotrope-drug.profile [sf.net]

Heck I'll just link em on the page