Critterding

Evolving Artificial Life.

News

03/14/10: Critterding 1.0 beta12.1 released

- some fixes and cleanups
- catch segfault when using headless without critter_raycastvision

03/05/10: Critterding 1.0 beta12 released

- critter selection and actions (kill, duplicate)
- new panels: neural net brainviewer, hud, species list
- touchingcritter brain input fix
- profile saves to ~/critterding/save/(profile)/(profile).pro
- toggle rendering of gui and scene (keys h & r)
- font switch to DejaVuSans
- an icon thanks to jrabbit
- new options:
   --roundworld: a round planet
   --benchmark: times a scene of 10000 frames
   --headless: console mode
   --startseed: seed for the random number generator
   --killhalf_incrworldsizeX/Y: option to increase worldsize when killhalf triggers
   --killhalf_decrmaxlifetimepct: option to decrease critter maxlifetime when killhalf triggers
   --critter_raycastvision: raycast vision for critters
   --threads, number of threads, making openmp (comes with gcc4.2+) a requirement
- build system:
   - if available, build against system ftgl (pass --disable-system-ftgl to use internal)
   - make install
- many fixes, cleanups & changes

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