Talk:List of digital organism simulators

message: We probably should add Spore in the near-future.
Once it's out I see no reason why not.  --Numsgil 07:58, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spore 

message: There are more programs:
-:	helix4b, helix1, CoreLife. --- Derived from or leaned upon Tierra
-:	Boppers --- [I never really understood, what's going on there, but it does have to do with artificial life]
-:	Greenbanks Creature Behavior Simulator v1.45, by J. Greenbank. --- A predator / prey / food scheme simulation of the parameter class.
aswell as lots of simulations with mere emphasis on flocking or boid-forming:
:	MFBoids3S, :  CoolSchool (predator/prey-scheme),  : FlockDemo, :  A-Quarium1.0 and 2.0
...................------------------------------------------------....................
Then, e-den (executable: eden60x) by Craig McColl, a program, which is - alas! - only a beta version, although fully playable, even if it has several minor bugs. It really must be mentioned here.
It combines all of the possible features for a complete - and open ended in complexity - artificial evolution program:
The Organisms have ..
o:	a skeleton with up to 16 limbs of 8 different functions (hear, see, weapon, armor, eat, bend(!), signalling)
o:	a neural net with hundred neurons, each with several dendrites and axons to variable orther neurons, thresholds
o:	an energy reservoir gained by eating or winning in fight, needed to sustain metabolism or in fight
o:	a metabolism reservoir, needed for reproduction
o:	a movement-points household, gained along timeticks, needed to move
o:	a friendlyness value, enabling the organism to decide, whether it should fight or breed with a confronted organism
o:	all of the above generated by the organisms genetic information, their genome
The 2d universe, the world, has grass and other organic material (made up of the 8 dead skeleton functions, so dead organisms contribute to the shape of the world or its climate) serving for different types of food aswell as one type of inorganic material (9-s), that constitute the inchangable (by running the world) shape that can deliberately be manually modified.
The program has several features:
o::   	The program handles genepools. Sexual and asexual reproduction, breeding and cloning are sustained.
o::   	Mutation rate, climate, population-target, auto-repopulation can be set up.
o::   	netsharing organisms by buffered email is possible (!). A major project of evolving networks of linked e-den worlds all over the world is possible.
o::   	own organisms can be designed in the bug_lab (or even edited manually) and tested on their fitness for survival and viability e.g. on 
	the included viable organisms (carnivores, herbivores, corals, explorer and some more).
The minor bugs are:
o::   	at reload of *.wld, part of the organisms instantly die for getting a negative "metab" when saving the world previously. This can be 
	overcome by editing every saved world and replacing every "-" by nothing. An easy batch can do that for all saved worlds.
o::   	(not a bug, but mentionned nowhere in the documentation:) inserting or loading organisms maybe even seems to go along with the 
	chosen mutation rate, so if one wants to be sure to have a spore of the exactly same organism, one should put the mutation rate to 0,
	then resetting it to the desired value after having played one timetick with the inserted organisms.
o::   	once connected to the internet, "frame with 9's" in order to prevent incoming organisms, is disabled in some constellations, and 
	restarting the program and reloading the (unframed) world is necessary, if the world should be saved, framed with 9-s. [I still don't 
	understand, what's really going wrong here .. at least "frame with 9's" is a bit queer to handle in the wanted way]
e-den was last updated in '99, when long term evolutions or very complex organisms run with it were still a long-winded task for machines under 1 GHz. The program fell to forgotteness, before its time had ever come and the author quit wanting to enhance further versions. Nowadays  generation of several hundreds can be achieved in only few hours of permanent run and visible results in evolution detected. The deep aim of evolving artificial evolution around the planet by internet is more likely to possibly be achieved  than earlier then.
The only lacks, i found, are - in handling the program - that drawing and designing world shapes is very awkward, - in real-likeliness - only, that mutation rate is fix (only to be changed manually) whereas in nature mutation rate itself is subdued to (meta-) mutation, but that is very a subtle restriction to criticize (Have a look at the incredible real-likeliness of the carnivore samples, instead!). Then, many idle organisms just don't die for hundreds of thousands of timeticks, allowing idle worlds to run on and on seemingly for ever, making it necessary to either interfere or deliberately declaring such worlds infertile, while in nature billions of years may actually be necessary for changes in a stable equilibrium of life (but not of single organisms). But that's maybe not the fault of the program conception, but of nature ;-) Graphics are a little old fashion.
The emphasis is rather on evolving species, than on learning. If a single organism has the ability to learn, depends on the evolution its species has taken up to now. e-den meets highest claims, I say.
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Forum/3830/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Forum/3830/edendownload.html
e-den is freeware
If you have questions or problems handling e-den or want to link your worlds online and exchange orgs by email, mail me: christof.held@t-online.de (the author - as I said - has quit working on the project years ago)
christof held, 16:53, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  e-den, a complete artificial evolution project 

message: I've moved some simulators around, if anyone has issues with any of the changes I've made, please tell me.  I've also added Spore to the list, even though it isn't finished, because its inclusion helps explain what I mean by "module based" better than any other simulator I can think of.  --Numsgil 20:21, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  October 2006 Reorginization 

message: I removed Impossible Creatures from this page. It was listed under module based simulators presumably because of the modularity of unit design. It is a real-time strategy game and not a simulator. I have never played the game, but it seems to me that unit design is basically designing a tool to defeat an opponent. I believe that if Impossible Creatures deserve a place here then so do a significant number of other videogames and that the inclusion of such would detract from the usefulness of this list. I intend no offense to whoever listed it. Af1218 20:22, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is sort of a grey area.  ALife is more closely tied to entertainment purposes than many other sciences.  If someone could generate a list of games that might be included, maybe we could wade through them and make sense of which ones might be included.  Something like Spore goes in this category too.  It's not an alife simulator per se, but it definately has a great deal of alife-like qualities.  --Numsgil 20:36, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed Impossible Creatures 

message: After a great deal of discussion, it was decided that each simulator needs a wiki page to link to to be included.  Framsticks is definately notable, and it should definately be included, but we need a wiki page at Framsticks to do so.  --Numsgil (talk) 22:24, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd like to see a Framsticks article. There are a few scholarly papers that reference it, which should be enough to kickstart a stub. Ideally we should track down some other printed reviews or articles too. Marasmusine (talk) 08:02, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nov 20 Revert 

message: These simulators should be added to the list once a wiki article is generated for them.  Please add to the list if you're aware of any unlisted simulators.
* Amoeba (Pargellis, A.N. 1996, Physica D 91:86-96)
* Framsticks
* Critterding  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bobken (talk • contribs) 17:24, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simulators needing pages 

message: I note this entire article is transcluded at Artificial_life#Notable_simulators. This isn't proper. Either there is grounds for two separate articles, or there isn't, but not both at the same time. --dab (𒁳) 12:17, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The Artificial Life article isn't exactly bulging at the seams, so I would support merging and redirecting this list. It would also be nice to find some reliable, independent sources for verification of the software that was re-added. Whilst we don't need full blown assertion of notability (a Nanopond article was deleted through AfD on those grounds, for example), we could do with some indication of importance so it doesn't turn into a directory of external links. Marasmusine (talk) 13:58, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

text: Merging it in to the ALife article is fine with me, too.  I'd also second Marasmusine's concern about including external links: there's a very real chance of it getting polluted with lame projects.  --Numsgil (talk) 00:18, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

text: Rather than a list of external links to various Alife projects, perhaps just a single link to an existing directory, such as at the Open Directory Project . This would satisfy the WP:EL requirement that ELs be kept to a minimum, and those wishing to browse less-than-notable programs have links to well maintained lists. Marasmusine (talk) 18:11, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: transclusion

message: I have removed the WikiProject tag, as this article is either a redirect or deleted. If you oppose, please restore the tag. Thank you, fahadsadah (talk,contribs) 15:57, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikiproject Computing