Web of Life

Live Demo

Game of life like program to simulate pops with neural networks occupying habitats

Features

• Generates habitat squares and their inhabiting pops
• Generates a neural network brain for each pop with:
  • Sensory input neurons
  • Hidden middle layer neurons
  • Output action neurons
  • Synapses between the neurons with random weight values
• Visualizes the selected pops brain as a layered graph
  • Select a pop by left clicking on it after the simulation has begun
• Runs the simulation of an epoch where on each tick pops:
  • Fire synapses through input neurons
  • Execute an action corresponding to the output neuron with the highest value
• After the limit of ticks reached:
  • Simulation of epoch is done
  • All of the pop remaining in the kill zone (red area) are culled
• Current input neurons:
  • Oscilloscope
  • Is up free
  • Is down free
  • Is left free
  • Is right free
  • Latitude
  • Longitude
  • Age
  • Random
• Current action neurons:
  • Wait
  • Move up
  • Move down
  • Move left
  • Move right
• Configurable initial simulation parameters:
  • World parameters:
    • World size
    • Initial population
    • Epoch length (number of ticks to simulate)
    • Number of epochs to be run
  • Pop parameters:
    • Number of middle neurons in hidden neuron layer
    • Number of synapses (connections) between neurons
• Configurable settings:
  • Time interval between ticks (0 will update the simulation on each frame)
• Reports simulation status:
  • Actual rendered FPS (Updates interval 1 second)
  • Current epoch tick (Updates interval each tick)

Technical

• Written in TypeScript
• Uses React and sass for the UI elements
• Renders the simulation in <canvas /> component
• Experimented writing the simulation and rendering engine with functional programming
• Renders the neural network with G6 graph visualization library

Development

• clone this repo
• install npm packages - yarn
• run locally - yarn dev

License

• MIT