Alien – CUDA-powered artificial life simulation program | Hacker News Reader

Alien – CUDA-powered artificial life simulation program

github.com

295 pointsapitman24 comments

The first thing I wanted is not trivial to find (vids on github don't load for me), so here's a bunch of links:

https://www.youtube.com/@alien-project/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwbMGPkoJmg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9R6zrdl6jM

also: not entirely clear how this'll work on Linux, at first glance it looks like it is restricted to a Windows + NVidia setup. Happy to be proven wrong.

If someone is interested in building something like this but don't know where to start I would suggest https://natureofcode.com/

It's targeted towards beginners and uses a JS library but the ideas presented are general

Nature of code sounds like a book about code as such.

Would have expected to be the other way around: the code of nature

I think your intuition was correct, it is generally (but not entirely) about modeling behaviors from the physical world with code (for art rather than science).

Highly recommend

I have a long running Alien simulation since some months (with power on and off based on my pc use).

I started with a "RGB Triad" Initial Setting preset. The incredible thing is that the three types of creatures are forming complex cell-like structures, with different approaches.

I have geometrical "crystals", long strings that try to eat others, spiked structures forming walls...is fascinating.

The visual aspect is important, but can you speed up the simulation by omitting the rendering?

Isn’t the idea that it’s running the simulation on the GPU; drawing to screen is presumably trivial, the physics is being run per-pixel so there is not much work required to actually draw the scene.

For me the visual aspect is very important. I want to have a fully browseable frame per frame result. Anyway you can avoid using render sync which basically let the simulation free to run as fast as possible with a minimal overhead for the drawing thing each X step

I fondly remember a flash game that involved small particles with their own unique behavior. Each particle could collide, react, transform, or destroy other particle material. I can't remember the name of the website or game, but emergent gameplay is always such a joy to toy around with.

"Powder Game"[1] is the Flash game off the top of my head that fits your description. If you're looking for a more fleshed out version with many times more elements/interactions, check out "The Powder Toy"[2]!

[1] https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/

[2] https://powdertoy.co.uk/

So many hours spent in these games :) Building distillation systems was way too fun!

Definitely a gateway drug to the sandbox/simulation genre for me (Minecraft, Rimworld, Factorio).

Countless hours spent blowing up pixel cities, tinkering with the particle interactions, trying to make a sustainable nuclear reactor... fun times indeed.

Tnx for those games.

Website: https://alien-project.org/

Amazing. I am fun of cellular automata and Conway game of life. This looks like a nice game.

Prety neat! Looks like AMD might be possibility as some folks are trying to run it: https://github.com/chrxh/alien/issues/99

This is breathtaking. I watched a few videos, and am reminded of the alien evolution simulator that I am working on right now. But where my console-based program is crawling, this project is soaring through the sky!

This looks great but how the hell do you pan the view?

This is a fascinating piece of software. I played with it briefly, it's quite the little evolutionary sandbox.

Isn't this how Permutation City started?

Kinda, if someone ported Alien's rules into the Metaverse, and then went serverless

I'm gonna have to get an external GPU aren't I ^_^

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