Oh man, I spent a lot of time in high school playing around with Tierra. It is a lot of fun. A while back I started to reimplement it in rust, just to learn it, but never got very far. About a year ago, give or take, I did do a reimplementation of another alife/GA style problem, https://gitlab.com/eythian/tracker - this evolves DFSAs to follow lines. I have some more ideas that I want to test out with it actually, it's time I got back into it.
My main idea behind creating the Genesys project was to create a network of worlds - I have full intentions to make the worlds connected in the future via internet and have functionalities to share worlds, creatures etc..
I just have too much more work to do and other more pleasant blockers like children :-)
In my case I'm doing it because I really enjoy thinking about representations of solutions that make evolutionary operators more effective - it was the topic of my masters thesis. This is more "pure" GA than alife though, mostly because alife was a bit too open-ended to structure a hypothesis around for a thesis, at least as far as I could figure out, so I had to compromise.
Multi-world with migration between them was my PgDipSci thesis :)
But I also really like the results that come out of alife in the broader sense, synthetic evolution, world/environment-building, and so on. It's quite a rich interesting field that's pretty easy to dabble in with some good ideas and some programming ability.
> As an aside, be aware that "genesys" is already taken in the field
Thanks for notification, I was already aware that it was used as a brand for anoher kind of service and was pondering if I should change it but this resolved that question :-) So many thanks for that.
I would be interested in reading your thesis, is it available somewhere?
> So... Genesys I linked is more than just basic CA, it consists of independent agents with each "creature" using a lisp-like instruction set.
Sure, I do understand that Genesys is an agent-based simulation rather than being ‘just’ a CA. Still, at heart it seems to be a CA with adjustable rules, and as such there is a similarly to my own program.
(I’ve never heard of Tierra before, but it looks interesting; I shall have to look into it!)
For anyone not familiar with tierra, peek into the rabbit hole :-)
https://web.stanford.edu/class/sts129/Alife/html/Tierra.htm
http://life.ou.edu/pubs/doc/index.html
https://ai2020.org/tom-rays-tierra
So... Genesys I linked is more than just basic CA, it consists of independent agents with each "creature" using a lisp-like instruction set.