Evolving Beings

This project creates an environment similar to OpenAI's Gym to play around with simulated "beings" similar to tiny ants or something like that.

These beings experience hunger and thirst, and will die if they run out of energy (so they need to learn to move towards food and water and eat/drink)

They also have a basic vision system, and eventually will be able to change part of their color as a potential form of communication.

---

The main objective of this is to explore intelligent emergent behavior - perhaps given enough time they will learn to communicate and collaborate towards a common goal.

Eventually every parameter in their brains will be "evolvable", allowing certain beings to experience less hunger/thirst for instance, changing their vision capabilities...

Current UI

Roadmap

• Implement UI rendering engine as a Python executable.
• Implement training engine as a notebook.
• Create world manager and "beings", with needs, an action space, and a lifecycle.
• Setup different training systems (genetic algorithm, reinforced learning, or a combination of both)
• Enable saving and restoring "being brains"
• Add mechanism for the beings to select themselves who to mate with
• Add food & water to the world, and a customisable algorithm to determine how it spawns
• Allow beings to attack each other
• Allow beings to eat each other? Perhaps only if the other one is not alive?
• Optimise world code to maximise FPS when running in UI mode

Running locally

Just run the run.py file at the root. It should open up a window titled "Evolving beings" where the world should start animating.

Development

Create environment

conda env create -f environment.yml

Update environment after pulling new changes

conda env update --file environment.yml  --prune

Update env file after dependencies:

conda env export > environment.yml