Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Show HN: Zyme – An Evolvable Programming Language (zyme.dev)
77 points by almusdives 10 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments
Zyme is an esoteric language for genetic programming: creating computer programs by means of natural selection.





I love this idea, it's thought provoking and I want to play

Is there a repository of examples or experiments built with Zyme? Curious to see what has been explored so far

I think it could be fun to focus on visual experiments; shader-like programs as a way to easily explore different outputs


Thanks! Since the language is still in its early stages of being able to evolve programs, I don't have many examples to share yet. I didn’t realize when I began but developing the language itself was just the beginning - I hadn't anticipated how much work would still be needed on tuning, development tools, and implementing the genetic programming framework before getting concrete results.

Interesting. I haven't seen much in this space since Lee Spector's "push" more than 20 years ago (http://faculty.hampshire.edu/lspector/push.html). I did see a mention of Push in the FAQ but it would be very interesting to compare this in detail. If I get it correctly Zyme programs are evolved on the bytecode level whereas Push's stack architecture is designed to be evolvable directly at the syntactic level? A head-to-head comparison / benchmark would be super interesting.

Completely unrelated (and apologies to the OP), Zyme is also a name of a winery near Verona in Italy that makes really unusual, complex and very tasty reds. Beautiful facilities as well. If you are ever in the region, give it a visit - https://www.zyme.it/en/

"While I've observed bloat in Zyme, I don’t think this is driving the increase in mutation resistance and survival rate" This is evident in the human genome.

This is really, really cool.

Cue the replicators.


interesting idea to say the least.

Is it named after the drug in Deus Ex

Sadly not. When I was developing Zyme, I was thinking a lot about the molecular components of a cell and how one might translate them into a virtual machine. I was particularly inspired by enZYMEs.

I just realized that that's what the oeigin of the deus ex drug must be as well lol

Zyme is an ancient Greek word that means leaven, a lot of organizations and companies use it

wow this is so creative!

Doing => to set variables seems like extra work from just equals. Hopefully it’s kind of optional like it is in R.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: