[HN Gopher] Virtual Ants
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Virtual Ants
Author : healeycodes
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-09-05 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (healeycodes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (healeycodes.com)
| jrootabega wrote:
| That green CRT "Ridley Scott Alien" demo is really compelling. I
| know it's from an actual CRT decades ago, but it would still work
| well today.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Shades of SimAnt https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimAnt_-
| _The_Electronic_An...
| nickcamillo wrote:
| I spent way too many hours simulating ants (among other
| creatures) during Covid lockdown:
|
| https://intothethicket.com/
|
| Latest version: https://into-the-
| thicket.s3.amazonaws.com/versions/0.2.7.1+-...
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Hey there! Nice work building something during lockdown :)
|
| I am also tinkering around with wanting to build a zen-
| management, ant simulation game.
| https://meomix.github.io/antfarm/ Mine is going in an entirely
| different direction than yours, but the base idea seems quite
| similar.
|
| The vision I am working towards is to build a desire for users
| to check-in for one minute at the start of each day and tend to
| their ants. There's a lot of directions this could go, though,
| and it's been tough for me to confidently determine what I'm
| optimizing for / iterating towards.
|
| Are you interested in sharing ideas at all?
| thih9 wrote:
| Related, Ants Sandbox: https://www.ants-sandbox.io/ ,
| recently discussed on HN at:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043229 .
|
| I am not the author, I just remembered about this submission.
| Also, I find it fascinating that there are so many ways to
| approach building this kind of simulator.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Thanks! I agree, there's a surprising amount of tinkering
| going on in this space and everyone's got a different
| approach. I'm determined to see it as a lot of opportunity
| not a lot of competition :D
|
| I think I am going to go ask r/antkeeping what they think
| makes ants cool and see if there are more emergent
| behaviors beyond pathfinding that are relevant.
| ajuc wrote:
| > Putting this all in perspective, if physicists ever uncover a
| Theory of Everything for our universe, and even if we deduce the
| initial state of the universe, we may still be helpless to deduce
| the long-term behavior of our own universe. Thus, as Stewart has
| said, the Theory of Everything in this case predicts everything
| but explains nothing.
|
| Isn't it the other way around with these cell automatons? We have
| explanation (cause we know all the rules and the initial
| configuration) but we don't have enough computational power to
| predict anything meaningfull long term.
| personjerry wrote:
| There's a variant of Conway's Game of Life called Wireworld which
| is turing complete. The idea is that there is a "signal"
| traveling along a wire. You can try it here, try programming a
| calculator if you have a lot of hours to spare:
| https://xalava.github.io/WireWorld/
|
| Back in the day Golly was the best software for playing around
| with Game of Life variants, might still be true:
| http://golly.sourceforge.net/
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Talking about WireWorld, we're making a game that involves
| drawing circuits. It's written in Unity and will feature 20ish
| levels, but we have a very early web-based prototype:
| https://charperbonaroo.github.io/bls/#0
|
| It runs a larger circuit pretty fast and allows editing while
| it's running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXYpvb1jkp8
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Conway's Game of Life is also Turing complete.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > You can try it here, try programming a calculator if you have
| a lot of hours to spare
|
| Somebody even built a complete computer in it:
| https://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html
| joeman1000 wrote:
| Anyone interested in this should also check out Rudy Rucker &
| John Walker's work on cellular automata [1]. These guys were
| obsessed with ants, hence 'fourmi' labs, fourmi meaning 'ant' in
| French.
|
| Both of these guys have done incredible things. Rucker wrote the
| Ware tetralogy and Walker owned/engineered AutoCAD.
|
| Rucker also wrote 'The Hacker and the Ants' where the protagonist
| (basically Rudy himself) takes on a virus which manifests as a
| virtual ant. Really quirky story, well worth reading.
|
| [1]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/
| is0tope wrote:
| Many years ago I took (oddly) a physics class called (iirc) "Self
| Organisation" while doing a year abroad in Germany. Despite being
| a quite small class, it really inspired me from the perspective
| of self organizing systems.
|
| I find structures like conways game of life, or slime mold or
| sand dunes to be fascinating for this reason. That from unit
| simplicity can emerge aggregate complexity, imitating facets of
| nature.
| klabb3 wrote:
| This stuff is fascinating, but also very humbling. Conway,
| fractals etc is truly a testament to how few and simple
| ingredients can create structures that are virtually impossible
| to analyze and predict without running the simulation. It
| speaks volumes about our limitations.
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