Vivarium

Vivarium is an artificial life simulation, and how I spend much of my time outside of work. If you want to see what it looks like, http://vivarium.io/life/ hosts a runnable visualizer. If you want to learn more about the what, why, and how, http://vivarium.io/articles/ has a collection of short writings.

Motivation

The project is based on the hypothesis that a genetic algorithm is limited by its fitness function, and that designing a sufficient fitness function for a poorly understood task is unapproachably difficult. It is my hope that as computational power continues to grow, lessons learned from these simulations will be useful in building more powerful generative models.

Development Environment Setup

1. Run gradle eclipseSetup.
2. Import all projects into Eclipse as existing Eclipse projects. A portion of projects depend on some Groovy code, you can find an Eclipse Groovy plugin here: https://github.com/groovy/groovy-eclipse/wiki. For most development, this should be sufficient.
3. Running any database test code requires installing psql, and setting up a user named test with sufficient privelages on a database named test and with password test).

Running Vivarium

If you would like to run Vivarium and run into any problems, please feel free to contact me.

• The desktop visualizer can be run with the command gradle vivarium-desktop:run.
• The web visualizer can be run with the command gradle vivarium-html:superDev, and then navigating to http://localhost:8080/html/index.html in a browser.
• Scripts can be built with the command gradle vivarium-scripts:build and run with java -jar PATH_TO_JAR (options)