Best demo I ever saw was ecologist Tom Ray showing Tierra ALife at the MIT AI Lab in 1991. Was a signal for the beginning of a new era, the end of GOFAI and the start of automatic machine trained performance.
Evolution's effectiveness in optimization/efficiency dynamics that Ray first showed in Tierra have been demonstrated in the closed world game players eg AlphaZero but deploying them in open world large scale environments remains open.
Would be interesting if it was easier to identify and compare their lineages. Hard to sort through all these little things swimming around
I wonder if they were inspired by it - the style is extraordinarily similar. Skip around the link to see the lil guys.
EDIT:
My memory is shot.
A couple years ago the dev left a comment on that same exact video noting it as an inspiration, and I had already replied to it that it made my day.
The benefits of a bad memory is that my day gets to be made again :)
Just joined as a patreon supporter!
Is this emergent behavior or pre-programmed?
The neural network can be pre-programmed (and the starting settings offer some basic neural pre-wiring), but has enough sensor inputs and behavior outputs that "If pushing a food pellet, swim to the right at an angle" is a possible behavior. This results in a clockwise swim direction that mechanically nudges other pellets towards the center of the circle.
Other inputs like "swim towards creatures of color #0000FF in your vision cone" (assuming the creature is blue) and "swim towards food in your vision cone" could have the second-order effect of "gathering food towards creatures of the same color -- which are presumably of similar species"
