Hi,

I've been on the hunt for an online community/forum that focuses on AI from a life simulation perspective as opposed to a game development perspective (eg OpenWorm but with a broader project scope, Daisy World, or, if you want to meet in the middle, something focusing on Creatures-3-esque organism simulation).

I thought maybe someone here could recommend something. I had a look at the recommended sites thread and didn't really find anything like this - does it even exist? I've found the OpenWorm site and Google Group and some chat bot specific websites, but nothing about the general development of life simulations. AI seems like a popular subject even outside of games, so when I first started looking around I didn't think it would be such an elusive goal.

Thanks for any recommendations.

AI and biological simulation seem to be pretty orthogonal fields to me. I'm not clear on why one would expect to find life simulation in an AI community or vice versa?

AI and biological simulation seem to be pretty orthogonal fields to me. I'm not clear on why one would expect to find life simulation in an AI community or vice versa?

Because part of life simulations, at least with more complex organisms, is simulating realistic behaviour and some sort of semblance of intelligence (I'm mostly interested in learning and decision-making). For example, this article on the brain in Creatures 3 is the kind of thing I'd love to find more of, especially in a discussion forum. Topics covered more in traditional game AI forums seem to be locomotion, path finding, crowds, etc - all interesting subjects that can of course be relevant to life simulation as well, but seemingly more about how the AI expresses itself externally as opposed to internal evolution and state. I'm looking for something with more of a focus on the latter.

But maybe I'm wrong and they have nothing to do with each other at all! I don't work with AI (directly) in my day job :)

Have you looked at more traditional academic communities doing AI research? I suspect you'll find a lot more pertinent material there, especially since game AI in particular is solving pretty different problems for the most part.

I'm not aware of any specific communities, but I do know that a lot of the behavioral and simulation stuff that concerns those fields does come up in here (and other game AI forums) once in a while.

Academic artificial life projects tend to be rather niche and based around studying/simulating specific aspects of biology, ecology, etc. Most of them incorporate some sort of evolutionary process and multiple agents. That said, starting at the "alife" page on Wikipedia might point you to some resources.

I'm not familiar with Creatures, but briefly skimming the link reminded me somewhat of Framsticks, which uses neural networks to simulate agents.

i experimented a bit with crowd simulation, evolution algorythms, and neural networks. after playing with them a bit, i realized, its not so exciting as i tought. i will release a software using neural networks maybe in the next month, but i realized that i dont care so much about these technologies as i previously tought, so i am quitting from these simulations.

Thanks for the input, everyone. I recently learned about the European Conference on Artificial Life that takes place this year and hope to attend that if possible - it sounds pretty fascinating. Maybe I will find some more related communities there.