
Nanopond: Artificial Life VM - coderdude
http://adam.ierymenko.name/nanopond.shtml
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paraschopra
This is absolutely fascinating and fun. I based my engineering project on it
and did an implementation in Python. For those who are interested:
[http://paraschopra.com/blog/biology/pypond-a-digital-life-
si...](http://paraschopra.com/blog/biology/pypond-a-digital-life-simulator-in-
python.htm)

This is previous discussion on HN about PyPond:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=673786>

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ralfd
How fast/slow is it compared to the C program?

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paraschopra
It should be slower than C program, although I haven't done formal benchmarks.

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geuis
The 8 hour visualization is fascinating to watch.
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4775386042852459808>

What would it take to get this running under OS X?

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taliesinb
Yeah this is pretty cool. I have a similar artificial life experiment that
goes by the name "floatworld" (<https://github.com/taliesinb/floatworld>).

The curse of all these kinds of alife experiments is the how many parameters
they have. It's hard to conclude anything when there are 200 dimensions to
one's model.

~~~
geuis
I'm an interested novice in this field. Would it perhaps be possible to do
some genetic algorithms on the starting parameters themselves? I'm not sure
how the fitness rules would be set, but it could be based around number of
life forms, speciation rate, or maybe if humans viewing the results of each
run preferred certain sets more than others?

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javert
I don't understand.

 _Nanopond is a "corewar style" evolvable instruction set based virtual
machine written in C._

What? I know what core wars is, BTW. So this is a VM to do something similar?
But then the programs should be evolving, not the instruction set...

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Monkeyget
From the comment in the code :

"The instructions are exceptionless and lack fragile operands. This means that
_any_ arbitrary sequence of instructions will always run and will always do
_something_. This is called an evolvable instruction set, because programs
coded in an instruction set with these basic characteristics can mutate."

~~~
javert
Aha.

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vasilov
Really nice.I got interested in Tierra a month ago,but was disappointed when I
found out how obsolete it was. A word of advice:add the project to github.

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martincmartin
Hey Adam, great to see this. Cheers!

