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vivarium

vivarium — a place where life is kept, and behaviour evolves.

A 2D ecosystem simulation in Go + Ebiten where agent behaviour evolves rather than being programmed. Each organism is steered by a tiny hand-rolled neural network; there is no backpropagation between generations — populations improve through reproduction with mutation, and adapt within a lifetime through reward-driven learning.

Documentation

Page	Description
Highlights	What the simulation actually models
Controls	Keys, camera and the analytics views
CLI	Flags for the GUI and the headless subcommand
Configuration	The JSON config and every tunable
Headless runs	CSV experiments, snapshots, save/load
Demos	The full feature gallery with screenshots
Related work	Prior art in artificial life

Install

Homebrew

brew install danielriddell21/tap/vivarium
brew install --cask danielriddell21/tap/vivarium

Go install

go install github.com/danielriddell21/vivarium/cmd/vivarium@latest

Quick start

go run ./cmd/vivarium              # run the GUI
go run ./cmd/vivarium --seed 42    # reproducible run

On Linux you need the usual Ebiten build dependencies (OpenGL + X11 dev headers, e.g. libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev libxxf86vm-dev libasound2-dev).

All randomness comes from a single seeded generator, so a given --seed reproduces the same run exactly.

Links

• GitHub
• License