It’s still very much an experiment. Best way to experience it is just to open it and watch a world unfold for a while.
I'd like more hover help to explain features, so i can read them while it runs. Next to 'Cognition' there is some help. I'd like that on all parameters.
And, would like to see results from multiple long term runs. Does it settle out in particular configurations over time?
And, need little more short description of what is going on, since it seems to cycle around different stability points and not really one life form take off.
Do you plan on monetizing this somehow? If not, open sourcing some, if not all, would be pretty cool, even if it weren't necessarily licensed in a way that others could 'take' it, if that's your concern. Nonetheless, a very cool project.
I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing hot paths and getting calculations down, but when the ecology goes a bit wild, you’ll still see temporary spikes. If you want to focus on stats only, you can switch to Simmer mode (no graphs) or turn off the arena, which reduces rendering work quite a bit.
Curious about the performance issues Meegul mentioned. These simulations can be surprisingly compute-intensive once you add physics interactions between many entities. Would love to see the code if you ever open-source it.
Nice work.
Also, it's currently running at 1 tick per second...
junovicz•5d ago
maybe-tomorrow•2d ago
Soup of Life is an artificial life simulation with moving agents that have genomes, energy, and heritable traits like size, morphology, and behavior. Organisms are born, feed, reproduce with mutation, and die in a continuous 2D world with different ecological zones that bias evolution in different directions.
Unlike Conway’s Game of Life, which is a deterministic cellular automaton on a fixed grid, this is an evolving ecosystem. You see predator–prey dynamics, trait trade-offs, niche specialization, boom–bust cycles, and extinction events. There is no explicit notion of species. Lineages and niches emerge naturally from reproduction and environmental pressure.
For most people it works best if you go in unprepared and just watch what happens.
dentemple•1h ago
As I've heard it said regarding art, part of the appreciation comes from knowing _how_ it was made (and why), not merely from what was made. We don't appreciate Warhol's soup cans because they're soup cans -- it's everything else about them that makes it art.
So, my recommendation is, make the narrator a default panel on the opening screen. Give folks a narrative description of the events occurring up front, and then invite them to explore the work from there.
abtinf•1h ago