From code to life

By Robin Dowling · 6 months ago

The visualization of life in the evolution simulation has gone through a few stages so far, and will go through many more in the future. Each iteration is an improvement and a step closer to full immersion into the simulated world.

1. Text based

The visualization of simulated world started out as mere statistics about the evolutionary progression, displayed as text in a terminal. While it was exhilarating to witness evolution taking place inside of a computer, it left a lot to the imagination.

2. Moving symbols

The first visual client rendered the entire simulated world as simple geometric shapes - animals drawn as wobbly circles, and plants as triangles. Species were indicated by colors and energy as amplitudes of wobbliness.

The evolution of the world could be seen moving from births to flocks, from migration to extinction. Groups of animals could be seen moving as a single being, murmuring like birds in the sky. Species of plants could be seen taking over the entire world, pushing out other species and taking their place.

3. Actual animals and plants

The second client rendered the exact same data as the others, but in a much more visually pleasing way. Plants look like plants, varied in size, color, shape, and attributes. Animals look like animals, also varied in patterns, shapes, sizes, and behavior. All based entirely on the genetics of each individual organism in the simulation.

4. Future...

The idea for the next client is to render plants and animals in 3D, making the simulated world fully immersive.