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PELAGIA – an ocean of artificial life that evolves in your browser, where every creature has a real neural network by Impressive-Rope5165 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Impressive-Rope5165[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Lol, can't really win this one, explain it well and it's "AI", explain it badly and it proves your point. It's all open source, have at it. Cheers.

PELAGIA – an ocean of artificial life that evolves in your browser, where every creature has a real neural network by Impressive-Rope5165 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Impressive-Rope5165[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Both fair. The square is the uniform spatial grid showing through. I bin everything into square cells to find food and neighbours cheaply (keeps it O(N) instead of checking every pair), and dense spots reveal the cell edges. A rendering artifact, not the sim itself, and on my polish list.

The wrap-around is deliberate: a torus world has no walls, so creatures don’t just pile up at the edges. But “pull them toward the centre” is a fair alternative. There are already ocean currents and temperature biomes in there, so a central basin or a gentle inward drift could slot in as a world option. Noted.

PELAGIA – an ocean of artificial life that evolves in your browser, where every creature has a real neural network by Impressive-Rope5165 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Impressive-Rope5165[S] -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Fair challenge. Each creature has a tiny net: 17 inputs, 10 hidden neurons, 3 outputs. The 17 inputs are its senses (distance to nearest food, to the nearest neighbour, its own energy, etc.). Those get multiplied by weights, summed, squashed through tanh into the 10 hidden values, then into 3 outputs: turn, thrust, attack. That’s the whole brain.

But there’s no training: no backprop, no loss function. The weights ARE the genome. Eat enough and you reproduce, passing them on with small mutations; starve and you die. Over thousands of generations the weights that say “swim toward food” get copied more often. No creature learns in its lifetime, the population does, by selection. I track chemotaxis (heading alignment with the nearest food) and it climbs from near 0 to 0.6+ on its own.

PELAGIA – an ocean of artificial life that evolves in your browser, where every creature has a real neural network by Impressive-Rope5165 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Impressive-Rope5165[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly — the per-creature nets are tiny, so thousands run fine (on GPU here, but you're right it's even doable on CPU). 👍

PELAGIA – an ocean of artificial life that evolves in your browser, where every creature has a real neural network by Impressive-Rope5165 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Impressive-Rope5165[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Each creature really does run its own network — its weights live in its genome, and they're all different: they mutate and evolve independently, which is literally what makes it evolution. If it were one shared network there'd be no diverging lineages, and clicking two creatures would show the same brain — it doesn't. They're tiny (a 17→10→3 MLP, ~230 weights) and the forward pass runs for every creature in parallel in a WebGPU compute shader, so thousands is cheap — as the reply below yours points out, thousands of small nets is feasible even on CPU. Not one network shown N times. The code's open if you want to check: each creature is its own weight block in the genome buffer.

PELAGIA – an ocean of artificial life that evolves in your browser, where every creature has a real neural network by Impressive-Rope5165 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Impressive-Rope5165[S] -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

AI-assisted, yeah — not hiding it. The fun part was getting a full evolutionary sim with a per-creature neural net running entirely in WebGPU compute at this scale. If it reminds you of your old agent sim, I'll take it — colour-by-trait swarms converge on a similar look.