Critter World Viewer
From Telkoth.net
Some screen shots from my recent build of "Critter World Viewer", a Java artificial life program I've been working on.
[edit] Picture 1
FIRST: This is a graph of the simulated world's population over time:
But before talking about that, I'd like to point out some of the features of the universe (which are mostly obscured in this picture >_>)
First, the isometric grid is the universe's terrain. You can see the terrain has height, and color. It's hard to see in this small area, but the color does have a gradient. Color is randomly chosen upon the universe's creation, does not convey any other information about the universe, and is currently fixed - it cannot be changed.
Second, the little purple-y circle/square things. These are the critters themselves. The critters currently have a fixed biology, but their neural networks can change through mutations. There is currently no plasticity to their neural networks, but that is definitely something I'm planning on adding.
Third, the red lines that stick up out of the terrain. These lines represent "energy" on the tile. The taller the bar, the more energy. This energy will slowly vanish over time according to various "physical laws" that are not important. New energy sources can also (randomly) be born.
ANYWAY: The graph!
A: This marks a period of rapid reproduction. Since the initial neural networks are rather random (they are based on a template of my design, but many of the specific values are randomized), many critters just reproduce non-stop until they run out of energy.
B: "Reproduce until you run out of energy" might, at a glance, seem like a good idea for survival, but the problem is that the children of these critters behave the same way. These are things that never move around or look for food, and may not even eat food even if it's at their feet. Consequentially, they all die off, resulting in this subsequent period of rapid DEATH.
C through D: This is new. In previous template neural networks I'd created, the population would remain rather constant, neither increasing nor decreasing until some time later, when many critters would die off. (The ones that die later will be the ones that have not found any energy, and are dying because their initial energy supply is running out). But I now seem to have a period, before this second wave of death, where the population actually seems to be increasing! This is hopeful.
C2: Speaking of things dying off because their initial energy supply has died off, this is the information for a critter who has run out of energy. Its brain has completely died, leaving behind a rapidly-dying body.
E: Oh, it looks like the population is dropping off again... hm :|
F: This is not a huge population drop, but rather the end of the graph. The graph is 600 pixels wide, but as you can see in the upper-left, we are on step 570, so the last 30 pixels of the graph are empty.
[edit] Pictures 2 and 3
About 1500 steps later, the population is just under half of what it used to be. The things that survive, unfortunately, mostly seem to be things that have found an energy source, and are sitting on it, eating, producing babies whenever there's empty space around them, however their babies are following the same rules, but now on spaces that do not contain energy. Perhaps, if left long enough, something interesting will emerge... or, the energy on the spaces being camped by these critters will fade, and everything will die. How sad.
The third picture is of another Critter in the same group whose brain has mutated, though I worry that it's not a very useful mutation :P
[edit] More to Come
I will post more pictures later. I'm still working out some bugs, like the simulation occasionally crashing as a result of null pointer exceptions (or whatever they call them in Java).
