Critterding

Evolving Artificial Life.

News

10/21: Critterding 1.0 beta11 released

- improved keyboard / mouse input handling
- improved gui with panels for realtime setting manipulation,
- critters vs food graph,
- exit panel (esc no longer exits)
- a few more body mutations
- fix: critter autosaving timer
- fix: crashes on exit
- many more fixes and cleanups

09/24: Windows executable released

09/16: Critterding 1.0 beta10 released

- changed the physics backend to Bullet Physics
- changed input and window backend to SDL
- a racing mode
- mouse support for looking and interactivity
- profile saving (patch from Eric Burton)
- fullscreen support
- many improvements, fixes and cleanups overall

Downloads

Critterding depends on Freetype2 and SDL when compiling the sources.

zips and tarballs

Sample critters are available on the sourceforge forums

development version:
subversion address:

svn://intranifty.no-ip.org/bengine

usage:

svn co svn://intranifty.no-ip.org/bengine critterding-svn

How the program works

Critters are informed by sensors:
- if their head touches food unit
- if their head touches another critter
- if they are able to procreate
- about their energy state
- about their age
- about the state of their joints
- what the world looks like (RGBA vision)

Critters can make use of the following motor neurons (actions):
- bend joint
- bend joint in other direction
- eat
- procreate

At default, the program sets up a small world with a relatively large amount of food units
and keeps throwing in critters with randomly generated brains and bodies.

After a while, one of these idiot critters will unavoidably be
good enough to maintain a small population:

Slowly but surely, their behaviour will become
a lot less random as they demonstrate increasingly
better survival skills:

Contact:
bob[dot]winckelmans[at]telenet[dot]be
IRC: #critterding@irc.freenode.org