[HN Gopher] Particle Life
___________________________________________________________________
Particle Life
Author : hyperific
Score : 332 points
Date : 2023-12-28 15:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| billytetrud wrote:
| This is fascinating. It's like a more complex game of life than
| John connoway's. It's crazy that little creatures seem to form at
| such small scales easily with these parameters. It's almost like
| the parameters of our real universe intentionally made it
| difficult to form life, rather than easy as some people seem to
| think.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| They are less creatures than molecules. Now, mind you, as some
| complex sets of rules approach steady state I can pretend they
| are far-flung stellar empires with colors ascribed to each type
| of system of government (and have).
|
| What is fooling you is the motion. This is sustained because
| the system has no conservation principles built in. You can
| make A-B pairs where B is attracted to A, A is repelled by B,
| and off they go, zoom. Were the meta-rules devised such that
| conservation of energy or momentum and such were baked in to
| whatever system you devised, you would see less exciting
| structures which would more resemble a late-stage pentamino
| explosion in the Game of Life.
|
| With a sufficiently large processor, I would like to see this
| in three dimensions and more options for force, such as
| dropping off as the inverse of r or r-cubed or even r * log(r),
| or some "repulsive at a distance, attractive at very close
| quarters" particles. I have a feeling that such a system would
| grind to a halt even with clever optimizations.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Ah that's interesting, I can see how that would result in a
| lot more dynamic behavior.
| dustingetz wrote:
| need analog computer for that :)
| noduerme wrote:
| This already does look like it has falloff... mutual
| attractors clearly seem more attracted to nearby particles
| than to larger groups further away.
| wetmore wrote:
| I assume it falls off at inverse of r squared, which is why
| the person you're replying to is mentioning other functions
| besides that one.
| noduerme wrote:
| I read them differently.
|
| _> > I have a feeling that such a system would grind to
| a halt even with clever optimizations._
|
| I took this to mean that they thought there was no
| falloff calculated at all. If there is, I don't see why
| substituting a different function, e.g. cube vs square,
| would be significantly more CPU-intensive.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| You focused on just one clause. Consider the whole:
|
| 1) Three dimensions, not two. Therefore distance is not
| the square root of (delta-x * delta-x + delta-y *
| delta-y) but the cube root of (delta-x * delta-x +
| delta-y * delta-y + delta-z * delta-z). More operations.
|
| 2) Three dimensions, not two. As you start increasing the
| number of dimensions, the simulation feels more and more
| empty. One hundred particles on a line a thousand units
| long is crowded. One hundred particles on a grid of one
| thousand by one thousand feels like more "room" for that
| same number of particles. In a volume of a thousand by a
| thousand by a thousand, one hundred particles feels too
| few, and one would naturally increase the number of
| particles. Naively, which is to say without
| optimizations, the number of force computed grow as
| N-squared. More operations.
|
| 3) Cube falloff goes by r * r * r, rather than r * r.
| More operations, by fifty percent. And I did suggest some
| more exotic functions in there which certainly could be
| more daunting.
| mattashii wrote:
| > 1) Three dimensions, not two. Therefore distance is not
| the square root of (...) but the cube root of (...).
|
| No, it is still a square root. The term under the root is
| correct, but distance in N dimensions (assuming euclidian
| space) is just sqrt(sum(delta-n ^ 2))
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Hah, you're right. Serves me for typing late at night.
| itishappy wrote:
| > I would like to see this in three dimensions...
|
| Oh, there's one of those too! I don't see ways to change the
| falloff though, just the magnitude...
|
| https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-
| life/particle_life_3d.h...
| squigz wrote:
| There's no reason to believe life is particularly rare in the
| universe either, though.
| billytetrud wrote:
| There are, in fact, reasons to believe that. Nothing
| definitive of course. But the fact that we haven't been
| absorbed by a von neumann swarm or something like it places
| strict limits on the prevalence of life and/or what stages
| that life can achieve. One would either have to belive that
| intelligent life is vastly less likely than non-intelligent
| life, or that life itself is quite rare, or that life simply
| hasn't been around for much longer than life on earth.
| squigz wrote:
| I don't see not being eaten by a swarm of machines as
| evidence of anything - but it is interesting to me that
| you'd qualify all this with "or what stages that life can
| achieve". So simple life could be extraordinarily
| commonplace, and considering the context of this post...
| billytetrud wrote:
| It is a fact that we haven't been eaten by a swarm of
| anything. Facts are evidence. If you don't understand
| that, I don't think we'll be having a productive or fun
| converstion. Sound more like you're interested in making
| innane snarky comments to fuel your own ego. Good luck
| with that.
| squigz wrote:
| Would you like to actually address the point I made about
| simple life?
| billytetrud wrote:
| If you made a point about that, it was not clear to me.
| Perhaps you were implying that simple life could be very
| common even if intelligent life isn't. While yes, that is
| a possibility, that says nothing of its probability. Were
| that the circumstance, it leaves the question open as to
| why simple life would be common but intelligent life not
| common.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm just a bit confused as to why the subject of
| intelligent life is the focus here, considering the
| context of this post is basic cellular life.
|
| As to why simple life would be more common than complex
| life... that seems obvious to me: simple systems are
| easier to emerge from chaos than complex ones.
| aydyn wrote:
| From a cellular perspective, human cells are not really
| more complex than smaller multi-cellular organisms like
| amoebas.
|
| Give the huge advantage that intelligence has for natural
| selection in complex environments, why would intelligent
| life not arise from simple life? It's not obvious.
| squigz wrote:
| > From a cellular perspective, human cells are not really
| more complex than smaller multi-cellular organisms like
| amoebas.
|
| That's a very limited and poor perspective. Yes,
| individual human cells are no more complex than others,
| but that doesn't encompass the entire system that has to
| emerge. A human being is - obviously, I would think - a
| far more complex system than a simple amoeba.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > One would either have to belive that intelligent life is
| vastly less likely than non-intelligent life
|
| That seems like a valid belief. Getting to a technological
| stage such that a species would be detectable over the vast
| distances of space could indeed be quite rare. You have to
| also consider the temporal aspect: intelligent,
| technologically advanced species may have evolved several
| times but gone extinct before we could notice them. Do
| other technically advanced species exist in the universe?
| Probably, but it could be that at any given time there
| might only be about 1 in any given galaxy and the distances
| between galaxies are great enough that we'd never likely be
| able to make contact. (and ~1 per galaxy would still mean
| that there would be a whole lot of intelligent species out
| there - it's just that it would be extremely difficult to
| make contact with any of them)
| billytetrud wrote:
| > That seems like a valid belief.
|
| Its not at all clear in general. It _might_ be true. But
| it also might not. It seems quite reasonable to believe
| that life inevitably evolves into intelligent life if
| given enough time. Why some life would and some life
| wouldn 't isn't at all clear.
|
| > advanced species may have evolved several times but
| gone extinct before we could notice them.
|
| All the potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, for sure.
| But it would almost definitely have to be species that
| never got to the "expand rapidly into other solar
| systems" phase.
|
| > at any given time there's only about 1
|
| This doesn't preclude us knowing about that 1. If it got
| to earth at any time in the last billion years, we might
| have a pretty high chance of discovering it if it existed
| on earth for any significant legnth of time.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > But it would almost definitely have to be species that
| never got to the "expand rapidly into other solar
| systems" phase.
|
| It's certainly not a given that our species will ever do
| that or that we'll last long enough to do that.
|
| > This doesn't preclude us knowing about that 1.
|
| Let's say we're the 1 currently in the milky way galaxy.
| There could be another in the closest galaxy the Canis
| Major Dwarf Galaxy which is 25,000 light years away. But
| being able to detect a signal from 25,000 light years
| away... well, that's the problem. And what if they're
| just getting to the point where they could transmit a
| signal now? So maybe in 25,000 years we'd notice
| _something_... maybe? (if we 're still around) As far as
| physically traveling 25,000 ly, well we know that even
| trying to go 1 ly is going to be super difficult
| technically. Similar problems even if there's an
| intelligent species on the other side of our own galaxy
| since it's 52K ly across.
| petters wrote:
| > It seems quite reasonable to believe that life
| inevitably evolves into intelligent life if given enough
| time.
|
| From what we have seen on Earth, it does not seem
| inevitable. Dinosaurs were the largest land animals for a
| very long time and they did not, as far as we know,
| evolve towards being more intelligent. The same seems to
| be true for many other animal groups that have been
| around for a long time.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| They don't seem to have created any technology, but it is
| hard to know how intelligent they were. Their brains were
| small, but crows have quite small brains and they are
| relatively intelligent. If dinosaurs had used tools,
| would this show up in the fossil record?
| billytetrud wrote:
| > it does not seem inevitable
|
| The belief that intelligent life isn't inevitable is
| _not_ inconsistent with the belief that intelligent life
| _usually_ will happen from any life given enough time.
| Why are you positioning those things as opposed? They are
| not.
| aacid wrote:
| I honestly believe that high intelligence while short term
| is extremely advantageous, long term it is self-
| destructive.
|
| I like to imagine there are countless planets with perfect
| ecosystems of living organisms where no single species
| dominates whole planet.
| billytetrud wrote:
| I'm curious what makes you think that. That is, of
| course, one of the general solutions put forth to the
| fermi paradox. Ie either the species develops species
| killing weapons (like nukes) or individuals gain
| massively destructive weapons. But I find these things
| unlikely. Even exploding all of our existing nukes in the
| most devastating locations would not destroy humanity or
| the earth. We'd bounce back - tho if such an event is
| inevitable, perhaps we would ride an endless wax and wane
| between devastating destruction events every 1000 years.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There is no such thing as a perfect ecosystem because we
| live in an imperfect universe, this is if you look at any
| significant timescale. Eventually you're going to get hit
| by an asteroid or a gamma ray burst, or some mega volcano
| is going to pop and cause world wide levels of
| destruction. And generally we see some reestablishment
| species is going to dominate for some time.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| There is no evidence that space travel is practical or
| sustainable. The only viable spaceship known to man is
| Earth, and we don't steer it.
|
| Maybe there are lots of earth-like planets with intelligent
| beings, but travel is impossible and communication is
| useless given the time delay.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Saying there is "no evidence" is factually absurd. There
| are a whole host of possibilities for practical long
| distance space travel. At very least for small light-
| weight robots. And it even seems possible that we can
| viably transport our entire solarsystem:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU . No evidence
| indeed... only if you lack imagination.
| nox100 wrote:
| It's not hard to believe that we could make self
| replicating drones in the next 100 years that go from
| system to system, make a few more, and continue. We've
| already sent drones out of our solar system. They don't
| have to go fast. They'd still visit every system in the
| known universe in a "relatively" small amount of time.
| (relative to the age of the known universe).
| dekhn wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to say that we could probably
| build a fleet of ships containing tardigrades in their
| dried-out tun state (which is biologically inert, up to
| tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and extremely
| resilient to radiation and vacuum), launch them with
| enough mass to reach a nearby (up to 10 LY at 0.001c?)
| solar system with a planet that has water, and deliver
| the payload to the water, such that the tardigrades would
| revert to their normal living state.
|
| It would cost a lot of money. It would take a very long
| time (hundreds of thousands of years). Nobody alive today
| would see the results. There are any number of systematic
| and non-systematic failures that could occur. building
| things that work autonomously for 100Kyears is
| nontrivial. Even if you succeeded- say, 100Kyears from
| now, one out of a thousand of your samples crash-lands
| onto a remote planet and revives- congratulations, you've
| maybe just contaminated an otherwise unknown ecosystem.
|
| The story gets more interesting if earth has fusion,
| stable government and research funding, then you could
| make humans into tuns that can travel for 10K years, and
| have advanced propulsion (.01-.1c), pre-deliver full
| infrastructure...
| lebean wrote:
| Turns out that the great filter was something as mundane
| as interstellar travel being impractical.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| There are a number of possibilities, which depends upon
| what methods of interaction we are looking at.
|
| For example, with direct contact, we can estimate a
| probability of life along side how possible space travel
| is. Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all and so
| there is plenty of life, but it is mostly stuck to its
| solar systems and maybe a few neighboring stars. Overall,
| given that we can send and receive signals much easier than
| we can send and receive space crafts, I think this isn't as
| useful a metric.
|
| The better one is that we don't see signals from other life
| elsewhere, but this still has to be measured by how likely
| life elsewhere would be able to see our signals.
|
| Lastly, there is the matter of what it means to be rare.
| Say only 2 or 3 planets in a given galaxy end up developing
| intelligent life, is that rare? Given the number of
| galaxies in the visible universe, that is hundreds of
| billions if not trillions of planets with intelligent life.
| Yet with only 2 or 3 in a galaxy, it would be easy for us
| to not see any signs because maybe we are the only ones in
| our galaxy or our galactic neighbors are on the other side
| of the milky way and we have no technology to communicate,
| nor will we for the near future. Hundreds of billions of
| intelligent species can be considered both rare and not
| rare given the sorts of scales we are talking about.
|
| Also other edge cases, like maybe intelligent life is
| common enough but it tends to rarely progress past a
| certain point of development due to wiping itself out.
| Personally, every explanation I've heard or can think of
| has some sort of unpleasantness to it, much like the quote
| that says either we are alone or we aren't alone, and both
| ideas are scary in their own ways.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all
|
| Except we have excellent knowledge about lower bounds on
| how easy and fast space travel can be. And its plenty
| fast enough to explore the entire galaxy on geological
| timescales. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s which would
| take it 1 light year every 17,700 years. Given that the
| galaxy is 100,000 light years across, that means that
| Voyager 1 could travel across the galaxy in 1.7 billion
| years. A spaceship built for that purpose would take
| vastly less time.
|
| Voyager weighed less than 800 kg. Using the [rocket
| equation](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-
| rocket-equation) and a realistic exhaust velocity for
| methane/oxygen of 3280 m/s, you can see that you could
| accelerate a voyager 1 sized craft to 3000 m/s with about
| 1200 kg of fuel, which is less than $1 of fuel, no joke
| (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/spacex-reusable-
| rocket...). Of course it takes a lot of money to just get
| that fuel into orbit: $1500/kg with a falcon heavy. But
| that means you could send a voyager-1-sized craft to
| space with the fuel it needs to achieve 3000 km/s for a
| mere $3 million (not including the cost of the craft
| itself). And harvesting methane and oxygen on smaller
| planets would bring down that cost by a lot.
|
| At that speed, the craft could cross the entire galaxy in
| 9.6 million years. A blink of an eye on geological
| timescales. And if we really cared enough to spend more
| than a couple million dollars on this thing, we could get
| it there orders of magnitude faster using propulsion
| systems way less shitty than a methane-oxygen rocket.
|
| With just 1% of the energy the sun outputs in a single
| second, you could accelerate 100 voyager 1s to 1% the
| speed of light.
|
| In short, if you think space travel is a barrier, you're
| plainly very wrong. Even with today's technology we could
| send machines throughout the galaxy in a pretty short
| period of time. In the near future, that time will
| drastically reduce.
|
| > we can send and receive signals much easier than we can
| send and receive space crafts
|
| And yet there are vastly larger motivations for sending a
| spacecraft than sending a signal. You might not be aware
| that nearly all radio signals that escape the earth are
| not powerful enough to be detectable above noise further
| than 1/2 a light year out.
| https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/33939/when-
| do-...
|
| There's no reason to believe we should be able to detect
| alien radio signals unless they are intentionally aimed
| at us and meant for us. Also, you can't see a radio
| signal that passed by 1 million years ago. Whereas you
| certainly would be able to see evidence of a von neumann
| swarm having done that.
|
| > Say only 2 or 3 planets in a given galaxy end up
| developing intelligent life, is that rare?
|
| Whether anyone would consider that "rare" or not is
| irrelevant. The puzzle would be: if even ONE intelligent
| speicies existed out there more than several million
| years ago, why haven't we seen evidence of their space
| craft?
|
| > maybe intelligent life is common enough but it tends to
| rarely progress past a certain point of development due
| to wiping itself out
|
| Yes, this is of course the premise of usual solutions to
| the fermi paradox. However, those solutions are often
| either "maybe nukes will destroy us" or "maybe something
| we don't know about yet will". Neither are super
| satisfactory as answers.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > the fact that we haven't been absorbed by a von neumann
| swarm or something
|
| Haven't we been? When I look all around, the whole place is
| simply crawling with self-replicating machines and some of
| them even got to a point of making first attempts to leave
| this planet to infect a new one.
| hsnewman wrote:
| This shows how life is emergent from simple rules.
| downboots wrote:
| how does it show it? what is meant by life? are rules necessary
| or just transitions? what enables rules at all?
| hyperific wrote:
| Physical and chemical properties of organic molecules give
| rise to emergent life-like structures/patterns. Molecules
| interacting via hydrogen bonding, solubility, hydrophobicity
| and hydrophilicity - repulsion and attraction - can produce
| protomembranes under the right conditions.
|
| In this demonstration, particles with certain rules can
| interact in such a way that self-organizing structures
| emerge.
| matt-attack wrote:
| A general question by those that support ideas like
| Intelligent Design seem to focus on the notion of order from
| randomness. Specifically the natural intuition is that the
| vast amount of order associated with life could never arise
| on its own from just randomness. It's encouraging to be able
| to so quickly demonstrate that in fact order can emerge from
| chaos. Even if the organelles or molecules or whatever you
| might consider them in these simulations don't map
| specifically to organelles or molecules or cells in our
| world, the general concept is important to understand.
| downboots wrote:
| where do the rules come from? Is it randomness all the way
| down? how come they run at all? how can a lifeform in a
| dynamic mess of jiggling things have a claim to
| understanding?
| smusamashah wrote:
| None of these simulated systems show replication evolving out
| of random rules though.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not enough compute, I guess :-).
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| If you fully simulated RNA they would. Someone has already
| reproduced RNA that self-replicates.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Life, uh, finds its particles.
| FpUser wrote:
| Really liked it
| theophrastus wrote:
| Well done: 3d is an option! Always wondered what emergent
| properties result from simple rules worlds when the
| dimensionality goes from 2d to 3d.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| This is a much more complete implementation, but I took a crack
| at this a while ago using compute shaders in Godot 4, if that's
| interesting to folks!
|
| https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders
| beders wrote:
| It is amazing how easily self-sustaining structures emerge from
| such simple rules. Mesmerizing.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Is there any "sustaining" in the simulation? Is death a
| possibility? If not, then there is no "sustaining".
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| There was no death for the original life.
|
| Rotting is caused by living organisms. Being eaten is caused
| by living organisms. Disease is caused by living organisms.
|
| They could not die until death evolved. They could be
| physically destroyed but that's not that likely.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Interesting thought. But how could death evolve when death
| is a prerequisite for evolution? I suppose death is a
| "soft" prerequisite.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Super cool! Earlier this year I created a zero-player simulation
| using pygame and several AI coding assitants to see how capable
| they might be. In the end I had to clean up alot, but Im happy
| with how it turned out.
|
| https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft
| bloopernova wrote:
| offtopic: I got a new PC for xmas, and hadn't really stress
| tested it to make sure the fan management curve was correct.
| Running the linked site's demos made the fans work and they're
| really responsive. Cool stuff!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Particle Life Emerges from Simplicity_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156592 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Particle Life Simulation_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680845 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Particle Life_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21875720
| - Dec 2019 (7 comments)
| airesearcher wrote:
| This is so great!!! Nice work!
| pbowyer wrote:
| This is the most interesting one I generated:
| https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-life/particle_life.html...
|
| It eventually settles down to one large and unstable blob and
| another stable. Neither move so that's it. But before that it did
| what I had expected to see with objects meeting and merging
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| Tagging along: https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-
| life/particle_life.html...
|
| This one is really fun for me. It has a lot of actions and good
| shapes.
| scotty79 wrote:
| This one is really dynamic:
| https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-
| life/particle_life.html...
| deadbabe wrote:
| I'm not really understanding what the "life" part of this is.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Indeed. If we described this as a "neat circular patterns
| simulator" would anything be lost?
|
| Is there reproduction? Is there evolution? Is there death? It
| appears not. Those are essential to life.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I suspect it is called life because some of the observed
| patterns looks a lil bit like something you would see while
| peering at a petri dish on a microscope (if you squint? :-).
| Perhaps it is implied that with the right rules you would be
| able to generate "the real thing".
| elwell wrote:
| It's an iteration on Conway's "Game of Life".
| superb-owl wrote:
| I'd love to see this on a toroidal surface
| justinl33 wrote:
| a Mobius strip, even
| sockaddr wrote:
| Fascinating. This reminds me of nanopond
| chuckadams wrote:
| Looking at the 3d js version right now. This might be my most
| favorite thing since the original Conway's life or maybe the old
| Primordial Life screen saver from the 90's. Have you considered
| adding shader support? I'd love to see a slowed-down more
| "blobby" version running full-screen. Probably turn my mac into a
| space heater too, but right now that's a bonus ;)
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| What are the philosophical implications of these life models? Is
| it implied that life as we know it may also have a simple set of
| rules like this that generated it? Or is it just a game? (as in
| Conway's GoL).
|
| Found some info here, seems like these are open questions [1].
|
| --
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life#Philosophy
| michae2 wrote:
| I never considered it before, but by comparison this makes me
| realize that Conway's Game of Life is wave-based rather than
| particle-based. That is, in CGoL the rules apply to locations of
| the grid rather than objects traveling across the grid. I wonder
| if this system could also be constructed in a wave-based fashion?
|
| Also, it seems like in this system the speed of light is
| infinite, since every particle acts on every other particle each
| frame, regardless of distance. In CGoL there is a speed of light,
| since cells can only influence their immediate neighbors each
| frame.
| brap wrote:
| If this doesn't convince you spontaneous life is possible I don't
| know what will
| shlomozippel wrote:
| Another similar implementation, including music responsiveness:
| https://vuzic.app/
| BirdbrainEng wrote:
| If anyone is more interested in this kind of stuff, then I can
| recommend checking out "Smooth-life" and "Lenia", the latter of
| which has a couple different, more complex variants... "Flow
| Lenia" or "Particle Lenia" come to mind in relation to this
| particular (pun intended) topic.
| ath92 wrote:
| That's a funny coincidence, I recently made something similar:
| https://webgl-particle-life.netlify.app/ (source:
| https://github.com/ath92/particle-life)
|
| This version does everything in webgl shaders and keeps all state
| for the simulation in textures / uniforms. This allows it to
| simulate and draw more particles. Unfortunately it may not run on
| all devices because it uses some less supported webgl extensions.
| grumblehound wrote:
| Reminds me of Hiroki Sayama's Swarm Chemistry:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpN-DE3o6u8
|
| https://bingdev.binghamton.edu/sayama/SwarmChemistry/
| Lerc wrote:
| I watched the Youtube video on this yesterday and have been
| itching to try a webgl shader implementation ever since.
| franky47 wrote:
| One of my first coding projects at school was Conway's game of
| life, but I found the black and white a bit too boring so I
| pushed the assignment further by introducing RGB "genes", and
| give spawns a combination of their parents' colours (with random
| mutations).
|
| It's very fun watching which "faction" might take over the board.
|
| Demo: https://genetic-life.surge.sh/
|
| Source (ported from the original C++ into Rust/WASM):
| https://github.com/franky47/genetic-life
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Even with such a basic system you immediately start to get self-
| organising little bubbles of life. If something had a way to
| replicate in these bubbles, you would have the first cell.
| bezdomniy wrote:
| I made a multithreaded Rust version of this (while learning
| Rust): https://github.com/bezdomniy/rust_particles
|
| you can run it with: cargo run --release
|
| No input yet, just randomly initialises params each run. But it
| runs with 4000 particles on my machine.
| smusamashah wrote:
| There is also https://exophysics.codeberg.page/ which turns
| particles into moving creatures.
| utkarsh858 wrote:
| The project is quite cool. I found myself tweaking for some good
| amount of time.
|
| But the thing is it does not demonstrate that complexity can come
| from simplicity. To make a 'life' there are 8 parameters to be
| modified across a range and 'fine tuned' to get some tangible
| stable complex structure, all to be done by already conscious
| beings ( Users anyone? ). So much for simplicity
| sgentle wrote:
| I found a pretty fun set of rules: make a cycle of -0.4 between
| the colours (eg G->R, R->Y, Y->B, B->G in 3d or G->R, R->O, O->C,
| C->G in 2d) and set the other factors to 0.1.
|
| The particles form semi-stable rotating rings until they get too
| close to another ring. It's quite fascinating to watch. Messing
| with the viscosity changes the stability and radius of the rings
| jantypas2 wrote:
| Very cool -- shame I don't have a wall TV to just run it on. I
| was however, disappointed -- I saw it as a T-shirt brand
| "Particle Life" for physicists. The T-shirts would have slogans
| such as "After listening to you, I realize you're just an
| unfortunate jiggle in the quantum field, so I feel totally
| justified in ignoring everything you say"
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| The code walkthrough was excellent and very elegant
| aDeveloperCase wrote:
| That's impressive.
|
| I had a similar concept in mind when I started experimenting in
| 3D with what I now call "Altphy" (alternative physics), but I've
| not been able to really make it work as intended (really, is far
| from working). Also probably the logic and idea behind it too
| much for real time processing. I'm sharing it only because maybe
| pieces of that code (or the idea itself) can progress into
| something one day.
|
| source: https://github.com/aDeveloperCase/altphy
| LoryGilman wrote:
| Mixing up Conway's game with colorful 'genes' is pretty wild,
| like coding with a rainbow palette. And about those blobs - it's
| like they're putting on their own little drama show, then just
| decide to chill. Also, gotta love the action and cool shapes in
| that simulation. It's like a mini superhero movie, but with
| shapes instead of characters.
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