[HN Gopher] Artificial LIfe ENvironment (ALIEN) is an artificial...
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Artificial LIfe ENvironment (ALIEN) is an artificial life
simulation tool
Author : Bluestein
Score : 105 points
Date : 2024-07-03 16:33 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (alien-project.gitbook.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (alien-project.gitbook.io)
| bun_terminator wrote:
| This is their youtube page, which might be a better demonstration
| of what this _actually_ is: https://www.youtube.com/@alien-
| project
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Looks amazing in motion! Also, here's the homepage. [1]
|
| --
|
| 1: https://alien-project.org/
| Bluestein wrote:
| With video names such as "Invasion of Paradise" who can
| resist? :)
| Bluestein wrote:
| It's very polished:
|
| "ALIEN is an artificial life simulation program that runs on
| a GPU. Its simulation code is written entirely in CUDA and
| highly optimized for large-scale real-time simulations of
| millions of bodies and particles (see the links for more
| information). This channels features real-time captures of
| simulations and technical demonstrations of the latest
| version."
| Bluestein wrote:
| PS. Also, nota bene, as noted in the docs:
|
| "Warning: This documentation is out of date and does not
| describe the behavior of the latest major version 4, which
| implements a new model. An up-to-date documentation can be
| found in the program help."
| tempodox wrote:
| Seems to be Nvidia only. Too bad.
| Bluestein wrote:
| (They ain't worth 3T for no reason, unfortunately :)
| dunefox wrote:
| I love projects such as this. Although I don't know how
| successful they're in actually getting new insights - artificial
| life was the reason I wanted to study informatics.
| Bluestein wrote:
| I can totally see that. Emergence, emergent phenomena are
| fascinating.-
|
| (I am convinced that at some obscure intersection of emergence,
| network effects and machine learning, there lurk answers to
| many, fundamental questions ...
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Do you mean emergence and network effects IN machine
| learning? Otherwise I would be very curious how machine
| learning fits that list in your view
| Bluestein wrote:
| Thanks for making me think a bit deeper :)
|
| After some review, no, I do not think I would _alone_ use
| "in" in somehow, I guess, circunscribing the probable,
| positive effects that I meant of emergence and network
| effects to ML.-
|
| In a certain sense, I think there's something
| "fundamental", a primitive, to ML and Transformers and such
| "big-data" and information techniques such as they are
| being applied to AI, that puts them up there with emergent
| phenomena and network effects in terms of constituting (or
| manifesting, or following, or embodying ....) some very
| fundamental principles.-
|
| So, in a sense, I am more and more leaning towards thinking
| that (particularly when applied to AI and the search for
| AGI) "primitives" such as emergence (particularly) are
| somehow to be brought to bear ...
|
| PS. As an illustration, look into JEPA and other more
| "holistic" approaches to simulating or achieving the "I" in
| AI. Approaches that are made up of very complex systems
| interacting with each other (some of which _are_
| Transformers, or verbal) but not entirely ...
|
| Now, coming back to the "in", above ...
|
| ... could emergence and network effects have use _in_ ML
| itself (as in, integrated or taken advantage of in these
| systems) and the answer would _also_ be yes, I think.-
|
| That is to say, emergence, network effects, ML ...
| consciousness perhaps, and other "fundamentals" might
| constitute - both as parts of larger solutions and
| incorporated within each other - useful building blocks ...
|
| Along these lines, there are some interesting
| "intersections" that I am exploring:
|
| - Bio electric signaling. Turns out neurons are great, but
| they are not the end-all of biological electrical signaling
|
| - Proprioception in ML, AI (!), and, of course _robotics_.
| There 's something about having a body or being "embodied"
| that has some bearing here I am sure ...
|
| - JEPA (I and V) an other approaches that are hitting the
| problem from a more "holistic"/complex approach, trying to
| imitate or use "higher order" systems working together
|
| We do live in interesting times :) (And, I do not mean this
| in the overloaded sense of the Chinese saying to one's
| enemies ...)
| RaftPeople wrote:
| I built an a-life system with basic creatures with senses,
| motion, consumption of food, and a neural net brain.
|
| Brains started random, each generation had a fixed life span,
| then next generation was created from previous with varying
| levels of evolution (top 10% best creatures left un-changed,
| next 10% tweaked a little, next 10% tweaked more...last 20%
| completely re-created randomly).
|
| I wanted to see some level of advanced control evolve, like a
| creature hiding behind an object waiting for it's prey (other
| creature). I didn't see anything remotely close to something
| like that, but I did see was some level of success evolve.
| Meaning some creatures had brains that allowed them to optimize
| finding food and avoiding getting eaten by other creatures,
| even if they were clearly using just simple strategies that
| ended up being effective, like frequently moving in a large
| circular motion to find food.
|
| This is the question the whole thing left me with:
|
| What is required to push this evolution to create the types of
| advanced control (intelligence?) that I was hoping for?
|
| Is there a level of complexity in the environment that is a
| base requirement? Meaning if the environment is too simple,
| then there is no opportunity to evolve the various building
| blocks that would all come together to produce advanced control
| because simpler strategies would always outperform in the short
| term?
|
| What were the conditions in our environment that pushed or
| allowed crows to become smart?
|
| Maybe, if the environment has enough complexity, then you can
| have many more species occupying their own little niche, which
| increases the odds of acquiring some mental attribute.
|
| Or maybe there is some very specific set of conditions within a
| species niche that opens the door for these advanced mental
| attributes to be valuable.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > Is there a level of complexity in the environment that is a
| base requirement?
|
| I think you are unto something here. Either that or a
| necessary minimum of sensory/processing capacity to "take
| in"/parse/drawn information from the environment, which
| amounts to the same (you end up with a certain amount of
| environmental complexity that you can benefit from, as a
| "ceiling" ...
| _wire_ wrote:
| Consider that the lower orders of integration of life are
| energetic molecular arrangements, then genetically controlled
| factories which make which make up the components of cells
| that in turn give rise to cellular replication, then cellular
| arrangements and multicellular organisms.
|
| The creatures you are hoping to simulate which seem to be at
| the level of abstraction of a nematode, IOW a model of a very
| simple body with a brain of a few hundred neurons, operate in
| environments so diffuse and rarified that superficially they
| don't seem striking behaviorally, even as they do the stuff
| you expect simple animals to do. A casual onlooker will not
| be impressed by the richness of the world of the nematode. So
| one challenge is you could be on the right track but find
| appropriate results boring.
|
| But it may be that the best you can do with a simulation is
| make arrangements seem interesting, because there may be an
| entropic blockade to stimulating life: life may be so
| efficient in its manifestation of degrees of abstractions,
| interactions, fabrication, layering, and interdependencies--
| its complexity-- that organization of models using electronic
| computation devices can't get within many orders of magnitude
| of life's dynamical density and therefore simulation of life
| is inherently impractical. IOW you can get from life to
| computers, but entropy prevents getting from computers to
| life.
|
| In life, is there any clear distinction between machine and
| code? Genomics suggests there might be, but so far fiddling
| with genomes is well known only for edits of taxonomically
| superficial traits. Has anyone shown edits that give rise to
| a new subspecies-- much less a new genus? Idk... but it
| wouldn't surprise me to find the answer is be no, and that
| epigenetic factors might inhibit any approach to editing new
| lifeforms into existence.
|
| Is life is fundamentally emergent, without possibility of
| construction? I see a definitional hazard; that we may lack
| the language or cognitive capacity to deal with life's
| dynamics. These may be off limits. Or maybe not?
| Bluestein wrote:
| > there may be an entropic blockade to stimulating life:
|
| Interesting.-
|
| PS. Taking this further, there might be a similar
| "blockade" to simulating intelligence. Or (definitely)
| consciousness ...
| smusamashah wrote:
| Is there any similar life simulation system which shows
| replication evolving naturally? I remember looking into this
| project once and replication is one of the already built-in
| properties.
| munchler wrote:
| Replication is a prerequisite for evolution, not a product of
| evolution. If you're interested in how replication first arose,
| you want to study abiogenesis, not evolution. The tricky thing
| about abiogenesis, though, is that it only has to happen once,
| which makes it difficult to study/model scientifically.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > The tricky thing about abiogenesis, though, is that it only
| has to happen once, which makes it difficult to study/model
| scientifically.
|
| Excuse my ignorance ...
|
| ... difficult because - I assume - it only having to happen
| once leaves you with little examples of it happening to
| study?
| munchler wrote:
| Yes, it didn't leave any evidence behind, other than life
| itself, and it could have been essentially a fluke event.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time.-
| dudinax wrote:
| You're implying there was a moment where there was nothing
| replicating, then there was a self replicator and life took
| off.
|
| That's not logically required, nor does it line up with
| reality. The replicators that live today are not self-
| replicators. DNA can't replicate itself and the chemicals
| that replicate DNA cannot replicate themselves. It's a
| complex soup that collectively replicates.
|
| It's highly likely that the "first replicator" from which we
| are all descended was surrounded by and descended from other
| entities which we'd be hard pressed to prove weren't
| replicators if we had the chance to study them, but
| definitely evolved in some way.
| munchler wrote:
| I agree that abiogenesis probably required a long buildup
| to create the necessary conditions, but I think there's
| still a clear dividing line between that first self-
| replicator and whatever preceded it. I don't see how you
| could argue that the predecessors were capable of
| replication before that point - it's a logical
| contradiction.
|
| FWIW, I think most people studying this topic suspect that
| something like RNA (not DNA) was actually the original
| self-replicator.
| bryan0 wrote:
| You might be interested in this paper which was talked about on
| HN last week:
|
| "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs
| Emerge from Simple Interaction"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820022
| smusamashah wrote:
| Thanks. They have linked a video showing this [0] and also
| ascii recording of the program showing self replicator [1].
| This is very helpful. It means at some point we will have
| artificial life simulations which do evolve replication
| naturally.
|
| https://youtu.be/eOHGBuZCswA
|
| https://asciinema.org/a/nXW8NFxiUtHiNtteJwXAXraFa
| eggy wrote:
| I still have the two Artificial Life volumes from the Santa Fe
| Institiute proceedings from 1989. Alien Life looks like you could
| easily get lost in another world with this simulation. I remember
| awaiting the game Spore with music by Brian Eno was being created
| with lots of pre-release press in 2007 / 2008. A lot of cross-
| disciplined talents were hovering around this field back then and
| emergent behavior was diffusing into all topics of conversation.
| Good times.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > Alien Life looks like you could easily get lost in another
| world with this simulation. I remember awaiting the game Spore
| ...
|
| I remember the (deserved) hype back then ...
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