Game-Of-Life-Implementations VS SproutLife

Might be worth seeing if you can integrate it into this multi-language effort: https://github.com/KieranP/Game-Of-Life-Implementations

SproutLife is an open source project and there is a writeup on the github page that explains more about how organisms, genes, and mutations work.

https://github.com/ShprAlex/SproutLife SproutLife essentially creates a multiplayer game on top of Conway’s Game of Life, except that instead of being played by people, each player is an organism simulated by a computer. The rules are that each organism starts out as a small “seed” pattern and then grows according to the rules of Conway's Game of Life. The organisms have an open ended genome which lets them turn off some of their cells as they grow, which counter intuitively can let them grow larger. The biggest organisms win collisions against smaller ones. Organisms can reproduce by creating more seed patterns, and passing on their genes to their children. The results are quite interesting both visually and mathematically. In particular, the mathematical part of it is that there is emergent behavior that continuously tends towards order while being disrupted by beneficial mutations that push the system towards chaos. The system demonstrates growth and collapse as seemingly complex and successful solutions are replaced by more effective simple ones. I think that ultimately this kind of simulation can potentially be useful to model real technical, cultural, political etc trends that we see around us which are all products of evolving living systems. I’m dabbling with some ideas for taking this to the next level. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Hi Everyone. SproutLife is a project that I’ve been working on for a while and I’ve finally put together a presentation + new code release.

You can download and run the java based application from the github page.

https://github.com/ShprAlex/SproutLife/tree/master/gallery

As far as "evolving towards what", here are my thoughts on the subject:

The inspiration for SproutLife was to create an open ended genome with unlimited potential for evolution.

The initial success was that this was possible.

Anticlimactically, it turns out that an open ended genome in a turing complete environment does not lead to some kind of transcendent evolutionary product. The solutions that emerge are still limited by the simple problems they are tasked with.

It is the evolutionary journey, rather than a specific destination where SproutLife can be most informative. It can be used to study the role that disruption plays as a threat to stability and a necessity for progress.

In particular, the process of "collapse" is an interesting topic for investigation. From Covid to the popping of stock market bubbles, political upheaval, and even global warming, we are surrounded by real and potential falling of the established order. SproutLife also exhibits this kind of behavior and can let us understand how to quantify and perhaps predict it.