Artificial Life Simulator ALIEN 5.0-beta

The ALIEN (Artificial Life Environment) project released version 5.0-beta, a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulator that runs entirely in CUDA, simulates millions of particles in real time, and is also available for AMD GPUs. ALIEN 5.0-beta adds a built-in MCP server that lets an AI agent build worlds, design genomes, run experiments and read statistics from plain-language instructions, alongside 15 cell types, evolvable mutation rates with meta-mutations, and a genome editor with live preview. The simulator won first prize at the ALIFE 2024 Virtual Creatures Competition for its video "Emerging Ecosystems" and is aimed at studying the conditions for open-ended (pre-)biotic evolution.

A GPU-accelerated artificial life simulator for studying emergent ecosystems and the conditions for open-ended evolution 🏆 First prize at the ALIFE 2024 Virtual Creatures Competition https://youtu.be/qwbMGPkoJmg <sub with the video Emerging Ecosystems </sub <sub All pictures and videos on this page are captured in ALIEN, not created with an AI image generator.</sub ALIEN A rtificial LI fe EN vironment is an artificial life simulator built on a specialized 2D particle engine for soft bodies and fluids. Every object in a simulated world consists of particles. They can be bonded into elastic solids, flow as fluids or act as cells with specialized functions such as sensors, muscles, weapons and constructors. Each cell is controlled by its own small neural network. Networks of cells form creatures , digital organisms that perceive their environment, move, feed, compete and build offspring according to their genome . Once mutations are switched on, the simulation needs no further intervention. Populations can adapt, lineages diverge and entire ecosystems emerge. The engine runs entirely on the graphics card and simulates worlds with millions of particles in real time. You can interact with a running world at any moment: draw matter, push creatures around, change the laws of physics or let an AI agent do it for you. The development is driven by the desire to better understand the conditions for pre- biotic evolution, the growing complexity of biological systems and the open question of how evolution can keep producing novelty. At the same time, ALIEN aims to be approachable, with a modern user interface, appealing rendering and a playful spirit. - Particle-based simulation of soft and rigid bodies, fluids, adhesion, fracture and damage - Millions of particles in real time, written entirely in CUDA and also available for AMD GPUs - Rendering and post-processing via Vulkan with CUDA-Vulkan interoperability - Hardware ray tracing: living tissue, glowing nebulae, and shafts of light and shadow - Real-time interaction with the running simulation nebula.mp4 - Creatures are networks of cells, held together by elastic connections that carry energy and signals - 15 cell types, among them sensors, muscles, attackers, injectors, digestors, memory cells and communicators - Every cell runs a small neural network. Together, these networks form the nervous system of a creature. - Genomes are blueprints made of genes. Cells read them and build offspring cell by cell. - Energy never appears out of nothing. It circulates between cells, free energy particles and an optional external pool. - Mutations of neural networks, cell properties and the genome structure, with mutation rates that can evolve themselves meta-mutations - Selection arises naturally from limited energy, predation and competition for space - Layers and radiation sources let the simulation parameters vary across the world and create diverse habitats - Evolution dashboard with lineages, population statistics and long-term plots - Autosave with save points and flashbacks to return to interesting moments alien-microscope.mp4 - Built-in MCP server: connect an AI agent and describe in plain language what you want - Agents build worlds, design genomes, run experiments, read statistics and inspect the result through screenshots - Genome editor with live preview for designing your own creatures - Freehand and geometric drawing tools and an image converter that turns pictures into matter - Inspection windows for every object, creature and genome, plus mass operations - Built-in documentation with tutorials and a complete reference press F1 - Built-in access to the simulations and genomes on the ALIEN server, no account needed for browsing and downloading - Featured worlds of the ALIEN project and Community worlds shared by other users, shown as a gallery with preview pictures or as a table with folders - With an account, upload your own simulations and genomes and keep them private or share them with the community - React to the work of others and sort the gallery by reactions, date or downloads ALIEN contains a built-in server for the Model Context Protocol https://modelcontextprotocol.io MCP . Connect Claude Code or any other AI agent that supports MCP and simply describe what you want, for example: - "Create a mysterious deep sea scene with glowing jellyfish-like creatures." - "Design a small creature that swims towards energy particles and place five of them." - "Set up an evolution experiment with simple self-replicators and report how the population develops." - "My population dies out after a while. Check the energy balance and suggest better parameters." The chapter AI agents https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/ai-agents.md of the documentation explains the setup in detail and contains many more example prompts. - The curious answer: Watching evolution at work. Once self-reproducing creatures and mutations come into play, the simulation does the rest. - The honest answer: Fun A fast physics engine lets you push, smash and rebuild hundreds of thousands of objects with the mouse. It feels like playing god in a universe with your own rules. - The academic answer: Artificial life research. How does complexity arise from simple components? How do ecosystems adapt to environmental change? And which conditions keep evolution open-ended instead of letting it stagnate? - The artistic answer: Generative art. Evolution is a creative force that leads to ever new forms and behaviors. Plenty of examples can be found on the YouTube channel https://youtube.com/channel/UCtotfE3yvG0wwAZ4bDfPGYw . Various populations around a radiation source Close-up of evolved digital organisms Swarms attacking an ecosystem Genome editor | | NVIDIA GPU CUDA | AMD GPU HIP or SCALE | |---|---|---| | Windows | nightly build or build from sources | nightly build or build from sources | | Linux | build from sources | build from sources | | Cloud instance | Docker image, CLI only | not available | NVIDIA: compute capability 7.5 or higher, i.e. GeForce GTX 16 series, RTX 20 series or newer list of supported GPUs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA GPUs supported . AMD: RDNA2 or newer. Support for AMD GPUs is experimental, so ALIEN may run slowly or crash. Download and run https://alien-project.org/files/alien-setup.exe https://alien-project.org/files/alien-setup.exe , which is built every night from the develop branch. It installs ALIEN for the current user without administrator rights, asks for the graphics card NVIDIA, or AMD as an experimental option and creates a Start menu entry and, if desired, a desktop shortcut. ALIEN is uninstalled under Settings Apps or with Uninstall ALIEN in the Start menu. If the program crashes for an unknown reason, please refer to the troubleshooting -troubleshooting section below. For long runs without local hardware, a nightly image containing the command-line interface command-line-interface is published on Docker Hub as chrxh/alien:nightly . It holds alien-cli and its resource folder. There is no GUI in the image. On a rented GPU instance for example vast.ai https://vast.ai , enter chrxh/alien:nightly as the instance image and filter the offers for a GeForce RTX 20 series or newer GPU. Upload your simulation file to /workspace on the instance with scp , then connect via SSH and start it by hand: cd /workspace alien-cli -i example.sim -o output.sim Locally, with an NVIDIA GPU and the NVIDIA container toolkit installed: docker run --rm --gpus all -v "$PWD":/data --entrypoint alien-cli chrxh/alien:nightly -i /data/example.sim -o /data/output.sim -t 1000 Windows and Linux are built the same way, using the cross-platform CMake build system, the Ninja build tool and the vcpkg package manager, which is included as a Git submodule. Getting the sources Open a command prompt in a suitable directory which should not contain whitespace characters and enter: git clone --recursive https://github.com/chrxh/alien.git The --recursive parameter is necessary to check out the vcpkg submodule as well. Submodules are not updated by a plain git pull , so use git pull --recurse-submodules instead. Prerequisites - CUDA Toolkit 11.2+ https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads for NVIDIA GPUs, or ROCm 7.2+ https://rocm.docs.amd.com/ providing HIP for AMD GPUs - Windows: Visual Studio https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/ with the "Desktop development with C++" and "C++ CMake tools for Windows" components the latter ships Ninja . The MSVC environment must be active while building. - Linux: GCC, ninja-build, pkg-config and the X11 development libraries: sudo apt-get install ninja-build libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxi-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu-dev libxcb1-dev pkg-config NVIDIA GPUs CUDA On Windows, just run build-windows-ninja.bat from the repository root. It sets up the MSVC environment and locates Ninja and CMake from your Visual Studio installation automatically. On Linux, or on Windows from a Developer Command Prompt , invoke the CMake preset directly: cmake --preset ninja cmake --build --preset ninja-release The executable is written to build-ninja/Release/ alien.exe on Windows, alien on Linux and has to be started from there, otherwise it will not find the resource folder. AMD GPUs HIP The HIP path builds the same sources for AMD GPUs in place of CUDA. On Windows: build-windows-ninja.bat HIP , which writes to build-ninja-hip/Release/ and covers RDNA2, RDNA3 and RDNA4. On Linux: cmake --preset ninja-hip -DCMAKE HIP ARCHITECTURES=gfx1100 -DCMAKE PREFIX PATH=/opt/rocm cmake --build --preset ninja-hip-release CMAKE HIP ARCHITECTURES selects the target architecture gfx1100 for RDNA3, gfx90a for CDNA2 / MI200 . If omitted, it is auto-detected from the GPUs of the host. CMAKE PREFIX PATH lets find package hip locate the ROCm installation when CMake uses the vcpkg toolchain. Adjust it if ROCm is installed elsewhere. AMD GPUs SCALE Alternatively, the unchanged CUDA sources can be compiled for AMD GPUs with SCALE https://docs.scale-lang.com Linux , whose nvcc is a drop-in replacement for the NVIDIA one: cmake --preset ninja -DCMAKE CUDA COMPILER=/opt/scale/bin/nvcc -DCMAKE CUDA ARCHITECTURES=gfx1100 cmake --build --preset ninja-release Besides the graphical program, ALIEN includes alien-cli on Windows alien-cli.exe for NVIDIA and alien-cli-amd.exe for AMD , which runs simulations without a window. It is useful for long experiments, performance measurements and the automated evaluation of simulations with different parameters. For example, alien-cli -i example.sim -o output.sim -t 1000 runs the simulation file example.sim for 1000 time steps and writes the result to output.sim . Without -t , the simulation runs until you press Q or Ctrl+C. All options are described in the chapter Files and command line https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/files.md command-line-interface . ALIEN comes with a complete documentation built into the program. Press F1 to open it. It is organized in three parts: - Start here: Getting started https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/getting-started.md , the user interface https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/user-interface.md and AI agents https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/ai-agents.md - Explore: the central concepts step by step, from the physics sandbox https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/sandbox.md and how life works https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/how-life-works.md to your first creature https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/first-creature.md , evolution experiments https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/evolution.md and generative art https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/generative-art.md - Reference: cell types https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/cell-types.md , genomes https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/genomes.md , neural networks https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/neural-networks.md , energy https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/energy.md , simulation parameters https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/simulation-parameters.md and more The same chapters can also be read here on GitHub in resources/docs https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs . If ALIEN does not start or crashes, please make sure that: 1. You have a supported graphics card: an NVIDIA GPU with compute capability 7.5 or higher for example GeForce GTX 16 or RTX 20 series or an AMD GPU of the RDNA2 generation or newer. 2. You have the latest graphics driver installed. It has to support Vulkan 1.3. 3. The name of the installation directory including the parent directories contains no non-English characters. On Windows, the user name should not contain such characters either. 4. ALIEN has write access to its own directory. 5. With multiple graphics cards, your primary monitor is connected to the card that ALIEN uses. ALIEN computes and renders on the same card and chooses the one with the highest compute capability. 6. On computers with integrated and dedicated graphics, ALIEN runs on the dedicated card. On Windows, open the Graphics settings , add alien.exe , click Options and choose High performance . If the error still occurs, enable Settings Debug mode , reproduce the error and create a GitHub issue https://github.com/chrxh/alien/issues with the log.txt attached. More solutions can be found in the chapter Troubleshooting https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs/troubleshooting.md . - Discord https://discord.gg/7bjyZdXXQ2 for discussions, new developments and feedback around ALIEN and artificial life in general - YouTube https://youtube.com/channel/UCtotfE3yvG0wwAZ4bDfPGYw - Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/AlienProject - X Twitter https://twitter.com/chrx h - Website https://alien-project.org If you use ALIEN in a scientific publication, please cite: Heinemann, C.: Artificial Life Environment . Informatik-Spektrum 31 , 55–61 2008 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-007-0205-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-007-0205-1 @article{Heinemann2008, author = {Heinemann, Christian}, title = {Artificial Life Environment}, journal = {Informatik-Spektrum}, volume = {31}, number = {1}, pages = {55--61}, year = {2008}, doi = {10.1007/s00287-007-0205-1} } Note that this paper describes the beginnings of what has become ALIEN. The current simulator differs substantially from the system presented there. You are therefore equally welcome to cite this repository instead of the paper or alongside it: https://github.com/chrxh/alien https://github.com/chrxh/alien If you adopt ideas or concepts from ALIEN without using the software itself, that is fine but please just mention ALIEN and link to this repository. Contributions to the project are very welcome. The most convenient way is to communicate via GitHub Issues https://github.com/chrxh/alien/issues , Pull requests https://github.com/chrxh/alien/pulls or the Discussion forum https://github.com/chrxh/alien/discussions depending on the subject. For example, it could be - Providing new content simulation or genome files - Producing or sharing media files - Reporting of bugs, wanted features, questions or feedback via GitHub Issues or in the Discussion forum - Pull requests for bug fixes, code cleanings, optimizations or minor tweaks. If you want to implement new features, refactorings or other major changes, please use the Discussion forum https://github.com/chrxh/alien/discussions for consultation and coordination in advance. - Extensions or corrections of the documentation, which is written in Markdown in resources/docs https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/resources/docs ALIEN has been initiated, mainly developed and maintained by Christian Heinemann mailto:heinemann.christian@gmail.com . Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project in any way. In alphabetical order: - dguerizec https://github.com/dguerizec - jeffdaily https://github.com/jeffdaily - Enitoni https://github.com/Enitoni via Discord - Gardene-el https://github.com/Gardene-el - mpersano https://github.com/mpersano - TheBarret https://github.com/TheBarret via Discord - tilsk via Discord - tlemo https://github.com/tlemo - Will Allen https://github.com/willjallen The following external libraries are used: - CUDA Toolkit https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit - Dear ImGui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui - ImPlot https://github.com/epezent/implot - ImFileDialog https://github.com/dfranx/ImFileDialog - boost https://www.boost.org - GLFW https://www.glfw.org - glslang https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang - volk https://github.com/zeux/volk - Vulkan-Headers https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Headers - stb https://github.com/nothings/stb - cereal https://github.com/USCiLab/cereal - Zstandard https://github.com/facebook/zstd - OpenSSL https://github.com/openssl/openssl - cpp-httplib https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib - googletest https://github.com/google/googletest - vcpkg https://vcpkg.io/en/index.html - Inno Setup https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php - WinReg https://github.com/GiovanniDicanio/WinReg - CLI11 https://github.com/CLIUtils/CLI11 - MD4C https://github.com/mity/md4c Free icons and icon font: - IconFontCppHeaders https://github.com/juliettef/IconFontCppHeaders - Iconduck https://iconduck.com Noto Emoji by Google, Apache License 2.0 https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt - Iconfinder https://www.iconfinder.com Bogdan Rosu Creative, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 - People icons created by Freepik - Flaticon https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/people Flaticon license https://media.flaticon.com/license/license.pdf ALIEN is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/LICENSE license.