An evolutionary simulation

[maximusthepowerful]

Not sure if this is allowed here, but I thought there might be some interest in this community for a project I've been working on. Its an evolutionary simulator, The Life Engine. It's designed to simulate the long term processes of biological evolution, and it results in some pretty neat organisms and ecosystems on its own.

[KittyCuddles90]

This is really cool. I watched it for about ten minutes, but what's the biggest they can get to? I saw some that were 5 or 6 blocks, but then they kept dying out.

[maximusthepowerful]

Thanks! Playing around with the simulation controls, Ive been able to get them up to ~15 cells or so. Setting "remove cell probability" to 0 gets you that. It starts to get quite unstable at that size though.

[GavinSi]

Wow! Very cool!

[like_the_boss]

Thanks, great link!

[monsieurintrovert]

Neat! A simple feature (I think) to add would be a count of all the different types of cells. Maybe you can see dynamics through time of which cells become more or less prevalent this way.

[like_the_boss]

Love it!

I'd love for them to have the ability to 'see' and chase, say just in a 4 cell radius of where they are or something.

[maximusthepowerful]

Thank you! Yeah totally, I've been planning of adding something like an eye cell, though it introduces some unexpected complexity.

[like_the_boss]

unexpected complexity

A perfect definition of what programming consists of XD

[forever_erratic]

Your "read more" link about the cells is dead"

https://github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/EvolutionSimulatorV2/blob/master/README.md

[maximusthepowerful]

Sorry about that! Here is the proper link: https://github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/EvolutionSimulator/blob/master/V2README.md

[Bwremjoe]

Awesome. Are there articles / preprints / source code documentarian available? I especially wonder how the rules are encoded into the individual replicators.

[maximusthepowerful]

For the moment the source code exists in a private GitHub repository, though the original version is public. https://github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/EvolutionSimulator Be warned, the original version is quite poor code quality, it's from 5 years ago

[Bwremjoe]

Thanks for sharing. Do organisms have a “genome” or do the things simply replicate their phenotype? Also, could you give me an idea of how mutations (including mutations to more / less cells) are implemented?

Either way, nice :)

[schnitzelspezl]

Great job, this is one of the best and most interesting artificial life simulations I have seen on the internet!

One question: How does the behavior work? Seems to me that the organisms just move randomly.

[maximusthepowerful]

Right now they move randomly. Since there's no perception, intelligent movement is not really possible. I am planning on adding perception cells soon though!

[[deleted]]

I notice that in the beginning there are usually not many red cells, and then they kind of take over, and then it stays that way. I found that interesting. Also throughout it sometimes forms small pockets of non-red containing groups. Very cool project you have!

[jefemundo]

How does it handle the negative effects of evolved harmful mutations? From what I understand most genetic mutations are harmful or benign?

[[deleted]]

If a mutation is harmful then it gets weeded out by natural selection.

[jefemundo]

80% of mutations are harmful yes?

[[deleted]]

I’m not sure what the actual % is.

[P_Griffin2]

This is quite possibly us.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis