GNU/Linux AI & Alife HOWTO by John Eikenberry (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

>studying this system, one can examine evolutionary adaptation,

general traits of living systems (such as self-organization),

and other issues pertaining to theoretical or evolutionary

biology and dynamic systems.

 

breve

 

� Web site: www.spiderland.org/breve/

 

breve is a free software package which makes it easy to build 3D

simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users

define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how

they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision

detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL

display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.

 

BugsX

 

� FTP site:

http://surf.de.uu.net/zooland/download/packages/bugsx/

 

Display and evolve biomorphs. It is a program which draws the

biomorphs based on parametric plots of Fourier sine and cosine

series and let’s you play with them using the genetic algorithm.

 

Creatures Docking Station

 

� Linux info: sylv.inkwell.com.ru

 

This is a free version of the Creatures3 ALife game. It has

fewer species and a small ‘space-station’ world, but can connect

to other worlds over the internet and (if you have the windows

version of the game) can connect to your C3 world. The game

itself revolves around breeding and training the alife

creatures, ‘Norns’. Its strikes a pretty nice balance between

fun and science, or so I’m told.

 

(summary written by Steve Grand included below)

 

The eponymous creatures in this computer game are called Norns,

and the world’s population of them at one stage hovered around

the five million mark, making them more common than many

familiar natural species. Each norn is composed of thousands of

tiny simulated biological components, such as neurons,

biochemicals, chemoreceptors, chemoemitters and genes. The

norns’ genes dictate how these components are assembled to make

complete organisms, and the creatures’ behaviour then emerges

from the interactions of those parts, rather than being

explicitly ‘programmed in’.

 

The norns are capable of learning about their environment,

either by being shown things by their owners or through learning

by their own mistakes. They must learn for themselves how to

find food and how to interact with the many objects in their

environment. They can interact with their owners, using simple

language, and also with each other. They can form relationships

and produce offspring, which inherit their neural and

biochemical structure from their parents and are capable of

open-ended evolution over time. They can fall prey to a variety

of diseases (as well as genetic defects) and can be treated with

appropriate medicines.

 

dblife & dblifelib

 

� FTP site: ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/science/ai/life/

 

dblife: Sources for a fancy Game of Life program for X11 (and

curses). It is not meant to be incredibly fast (use xlife for

that:-). But it IS meant to allow the easy editing and viewing

of Life objects and has some powerful features. The related

dblifelib package is a library of Life objects to use with the

program.

 

dblifelib: This is a library of interesting Life objects,

including oscillators, spaceships, puffers, and other weird

things. The related dblife package contains a Life program

which can read the objects in the Library.

 

Drone

 

� Web site: www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/Drone/

 

Drone is a tool for automatically running batch jobs of a

simulation program. It allows sweeps over arbitrary sets of

parameters, as well as multiple runs for each parameter set,

with a separate random seed for each run. The runs may be

executed either on a single computer or over the Internet on a

set of remote hosts. Drone is written in Expect (an extension to

the Tcl scripting language) and runs under Unix. It was

originally designed for use with the Swarm agent-based

simulation framework, but Drone can be used with any simulation

program that reads parameters from the command line or from an

input file.

 

EcoLab

 

� Web site: parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/ecolab/

 

EcoLab is a system that implements an abstract ecology model. It

is written as a set of Tcl/Tk commands so that the model

parameters can easily be changed on the fly by means of editing

a script. The model itself is written in C++.

 

Game Of Life (GOL)

 

� FTP site: ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/science/ai/life/

 

GOL is a simulator for conway’s game of life (a simple cellular

automata), and other simple rule sets. The emphasis here is on

speed and scale, in other words you can setup large and fast

simulations.

 

gant

 

� Web site: gant.sourceforge.net

 

This project is an ANSI C++ implementation of the Generalized

Langton Ant, which lives on a torus.

 

gLife

 

� Web site: glife.sourceforge.net

 

� SourceForge site: sourceforge.net/projects/glife/

 

This program is similiar to “Conway’s Game of Life” but yet it

is very different. It takes “Conway’s Game of Life” and applies

it to a society (human society). This means there is a very

different (and much larger) ruleset than in the original game.

Things need to be taken into account such as the terrain, age,

sex, culture, movement, etc

 

Golly

 

� Web site: golly.sourceforge.net

 

An open source, cross-platform implementation of John Conway’s

Game of Life with an unbounded universe and capable of running

patterns faster and further than ever before. It has many

features such as;

 

� Reads RLE, Life 1.05/1.06, and macrocell formats.

 

� Supports Wolfram’s 1D rules.

 

� Can paste in patterns from the clipboard.

 

� Scriptable via Python.

 

Langton’s Ant

 

� Web site: www.theory.org/software/ant/

 

Langton’s Ant is an example of a finite-state cellular automata.

The ant (or ants) start out on a grid. Each cell is either black

or white. If the ant is on a black square, it turns right 90

and moves forward one unit. If the ant is on a white square, it

turns left 90 and moves forward one unit. And when the ant

leaves a square, it inverts the color. The neat thing about

Langton’s Ant is that no matter what pattern field you start it

out on, it eventually builds a “road,” which is a series of 117

steps that repeat indefinitely, each time leaving the ant

displaced one pixel vertically and horizontally.

 

LEE

 

� Web site: www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/LEE/

 

LEE (Latent Energy Environments) is both an Alife model and a

software tool to be used for simulations within the framework of

that model. We hope that LEE will help understand a broad range

of issues in theoretical, behavioral, and evolutionary biology.

The LEE tool described here consists of approximately 7,000

lines of C code and runs in both Unix and Macintosh platforms.

 

MATREM

 

� Web site: www.phys.uu.nl/~romans/

 

Matrem is a computer program that simulates life. It belongs to

the emerging science of “artificial life”, which studies

evolution and complex systems in general by simulation. Matrem

is also a game, where players compete to create the fittest

lifeform. Their efforts are the driving force behind the

program.

 

Noble Ape

 

� Web site: www.nobleape.com/sim/

 

The Noble Ape Simulation has been developed (as the Nervana

Simulation) since 1996. The aim of the simulation is to create a

detailed biological environment and a cognitive simulation. The

Simulation is intended as a palette for open source development.

It provides a stable means of simulating large scale

environments and cognitive processes.

 

For MacOS Classic and X, with Java, Windows and Linux(Motif)

versions in beta. Features a non-polygonal graphics engine

(Ocelot) and a command-line version

 

POSES++

 

� Web site: www.gpc.de/eindex.html

 

The POSES++ software tool supports the development and

simulation of models. Regarding the simulation technique models

are suitable reproductions of real or planned systems for their

simulative investigation.

 

In all industrial sectors or branches POSES++ can model and

simulate any arbitrary system which is based on a discrete and

discontinuous behaviour. Also continuous systems can mostly be

handled like discrete systems e.g., by quantity discretion and

batch processing.

 

Tierra

 

� Web site: www.his.atr.jp/~ray/tierra/

 

Tierra’s written in the C programming language. This source code

creates a virtual computer and its operating system, whose

architecture has been designed in such a way that the executable

machine codes are evolvable. This means that the machine code

can be mutated (by flipping bits at random) or recombined (by

swapping segments of code between algorithms), and the resulting

code remains functional enough of the time for natural (or

presumably artificial) selection to be able to improve the code

over time.

 

Trend

 

� Web site: www.complex.iastate.edu/download/Trend/

 

Trend is a general purpose cellular automata simulation

environment with an integrated high level language compiler, a

beautiful graphical user interface, and a fast, three stage

cached simulation engine. This is the simulation system that was

used to discover the first emergent self-replicating cellular

automata rule set, and the first problem solving self-replication loop.

 

Since its simulator is very flexible with regard to cellular

space sizes, cell structures, neighborhood structures and

cellular automata rules, Trend can simulate almost all one or

two-dimensional cellular automata models. It also has a smart

backtracking feature which simplifies rule set development a lot

by allowing users to go back to a previous stage of simulation!

With other advanced features, Trend is probably the most easy to

use 2-dimensional cellular automata simulator.

 

Also available is jTrend. A Java version of Trend.

 

XLIFE

 

� FTP site: surf.de.uu.net/zooland/download/packages/xlife/

 

This program will evolve patterns for John Horton Conway’s game

of Life. It will also handle general cellular automata with the

orthogonal neighborhood and up to 8 states (it’s possible to

recompile for more states, but very expensive in memory).

Transition rules and sample patterns are provided for the

8-state automaton of E. F. Codd, the Wireworld automaton, and a

whole class of `Prisoner’s Dilemma’ games.

 

Xtoys

 

� Web site: thy.phy.bnl.gov/www/xtoys/xtoys.html

 

xtoys contains a set of cellular automata simulators for X

windows. Programs included are:

 

� xising – a two dimensional Ising model simulator,

 

� xpotts – the two dimensional Potts model,

 

� xautomalab – a totalistic cellular automaton simulator,

 

� xsand – for the Bak, Tang, Wiesenfeld sandpile model,

 

� xwaves – demonstrates three different wave equations,

 

� schrodinger – play with the Scrodinger equation in an

adjustable potential.

6. Agents

Also known as intelligent software agents or just agents, this area of

AI research deals with simple applications of small programs that aid

the user in his/her work. They can be mobile (able to stop their

execution on one machine and resume it on another) or static (live in

one machine). They are usually specific to the task (and therefore

fairly simple) and meant to help the user much as an assistant would.

The most popular (ie. widely known) use of this type of application to

date are the web robots that many of the indexing engines (eg.

webcrawler) use.

 

3APL

 

� Web site: www.cs.uu.nl/3apl/

 

� Wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3APL

 

� Mobile version: www.cs.uu.nl/3apl-m/

 

3APL is a programming language for implementing cognitive

agents. It provides programming constructs for implementing

agents’ beliefs, goals, basic capabilities (such as belief

updates, external actions, or communication actions) and a set

of practical reasoning rules through which agents’ goals can be

updated or revised. The 3APL programs are executed on the 3APL

platform. Each 3APL program is executed by means of an

interpreter that deliberates on the cognitive attitudes of that

agent.

 

Agent

 

� FTP site: www.cpan.org/modules/by-category/23_Miscellaneous_Modules/Agent/

 

The Agent is a prototype for an Information Agent system. It is

both platform and language independent, as it stores contained

information in simple packed strings. It can be packed and

shipped across any network with any format, as it freezes itself

in its current state.

 

agentTool

 

� Web site: macr.cis.ksu.edu/projects/agentTool/agentool.htm

 

� Download site:

macr.cis.ksu.edu/projects/agentTool/registration.htm

 

Another Java based agent development framework. Fairly unique in

that it emphasizes the use of a GUI for designing the system

which will “semi-automatically synthesize multiagent systems to

meet