Sprout Life

Hey guys, I made this, I would be happy to tell you more about it. The idea is pretty simple, static 2x2 blocks are replaced by another shape that creates a lot of growth. That replacement is treated like the birth of a new organism. The goal of the organism is to produce more 2x2 blocks. It can have slight mutations that make it faster to produce these blocks. What's interesting about this is that rather than having reproduction be a given, an organism spends it's whole life building a structure that lets it reproduce. It can collide with other organisms and disrupt them. It's simple, but it's open ended and is fast to compute.

Awesome! Replacing one block with another is clever, although it's tricky when organisms of one species are adjacent to organisms of another species.

I've played around with a similar idea in falling sand games [0], where individual cells interact to create new cells, but I got stuck developing a language flexible enough for greater expressiveness while still being performant.

[0] https://github.com/ericleong/sand.js

Very cool! I'm reading and coding along with Sher's Neuroevolution Through Erlang to learn the benefits of Erlang/BEAM for just such stuff. I believe somebody is also translating it to Elixir. The visualizations are great. I guess Java doesn't have a problem with distributed computing or processes for such work?

Anyone who enjoys this sort of work may also like the book Complexity by Waldrop, which covers the history of Complexity theory through the eyes of the people who created it. It's a really fun story that's inspirational and intellectually satisfying.

"The enemy of my enemy is my food."

I love this restatement of RPS.

This is pretty cool. Kudos.