Many (many!) moons ago I was inspired by this ai-junkie project to build my own version. The project uses a genetic algorithm to train the neural nets driving the agents which need to collect the 'food'.

I took it a little further than they did, I had 'poison' to avoid and I toyed with different fitness functions and (what we would today call) 'deep' neural nets. All in all it's fun to see the different behaviours and strategies for collecting 'food' and avoiding 'poison' play out.

I took it a little further than they did, I had 'poison' to avoid and I toyed with different fitness functions and (what we would today call) 'deep' neural nets. All in all it's fun to see the different behaviours and strategies for collecting 'food' and avoiding 'poison' play out.

Neat, what kind of tricks did you use for that??

Palaeontology is kind of a hobby of mine. If i can help with a little background i will be glad to do so if you are thinking of a simulation of natural processes. Only programming is s skill that i am just about to develop (that's why i'm here).

I can imaging that the capabilities of a good pc could manage it. A full-featured evolution is just a very complex thing and will only be credible if two separate runs of exactly the same starting conditions would not lead to exactly the same result ....

I see no reason to doubt the credibility of deterministic evolution, though.