Each organism, or 'swimmer', is represented by a coloured circle. The open circles represent senses that detect other entities within their area. The straight line points directly forwards and detects a single entity touching it, the closest to the swimmer. Food particles are represented by green circles.

Each swimmer can only detect items within the range of its senses.

The right hand column contains a graph. The axis are rotated 90 degrees clockwise, which means the (0, 0) is the top left, the y-axis runs along the top, and the x-axis runs down the left edge. The green line represents the energy contained by all existing food pellets, the blue line represents the energy held by all existing swimmers. There is no fixed quantity of energy however there is a limited spawn rate for food pellets. As swimmers become more efficient at finding food, they should eat the pellets more quickly, and waste less energy, shifting the balance of energy further from green to blue.

The bottom panel contains an inspector, this allows a selected entity to be analysed. The boxes along the top represent each of the sensory inputs a swimmer has, the middle big box is its brain, and the box along the bottom is its tail (or tails if it has evolved more than one!). The colour of a node represents its value, red is negative, blue is positive, the transparency denotes the size of the value. The values are usually between -1 (opaque red) to 1 (opaque blue), however if a value is bigger the node gets drawn larger. The connections can also be positive or negative. The width represents the size of the connection and the transparency represents the current usage of the connection.

A swimmer's genetics are quite complex. A genome can contain one or more chromosomes, which in turn can contain one or more genes. Chromosomes exist in pairs, like in real life eukaryotes. When combining genomes, each swimmer parent contributes a single chromosome from each pair, so that a child recieves two copies of each gene (for a-sexual reproduction, the single parent's genome is copied and treated like two genomes from separate parents).

Currently the following genes exist:

• GenePigment: Contributes to the final colour of the swimmer,
• GeneBrain: Contains the complete description of the main neural network for the swimmer,
• GeneSenseTraitsInArea: Adds a circular sense that detects all other entities within an area,
• GeneSenseTraitsRaycast: Adds a line sense that detects the single nearest entity that is colliding with the line,
• GeneSenseTraitsSelf: Adds a sense that measures certain aspects of the swimmers own state,
• GeneSenseTraitsTouching: Adds a sense that detects all entities colliding with a single point,
• GeneSenseMagneticField: Adds a sense that indicates the angle to (0, 0) and the distance to it,
• GeneSenseRandom: Adds a sense that detects a low pass filtered number. The filter helps the value to change more gradually,
• GeneSenseSine: Adds a sense that detects a constantly oscillating number, based on a sine wave
• GeneEffectorTail: Adds an effector that allows the entity to move forwards, and turn left or right.

The interface is currently very simple, left click & drag to move, scroll to zoom. You can also right click on a swimmer to select it. When a swimmer is selected, the "Brain Inspector" view on the right will populate, and some details about the swimmer will be displayed.

Note that there are invisible handles between each section that can be used to adjust the sizes of the panels, this is a bug in Qt, there is a plan to work around it by drawing a custom handle. For now the mouse will change from a pointer to a resize arrow when it is over the handle.

• Settings:
  • Reset: Removes all entities, sets time to 0 and respawns the default feeders and a number of default swimmers.
  • Spawn Food: A toggle switch, when pressed down (default) food will spawn in the simulation. When lifted, food will stop spawning.
  • Select Fittest: Searches the simulation for the swimmer with the most living descendants and selects it.
  • Follow: Each tick the Universe's view is adjusted so the selected swimmer is always in the centre.
• Simulation:
  • The mouse can be used to pan (left mouse button, click and drag), zoom (scroll wheel), and select a swimmer (right mouse button).
  • Pause: A toggle switch, the simulation will not progressed when this button is down.
  • Limit: A toggle switch, when pressed down, the simulation will not delay between ticks (default).
  • TPS: "Ticks per Second" The value in this box is the maximum number of simulation ticks to be computed per second. The limit is only applied if "Limit" (button to the left) is pressed down.
  • FPS: "Frames per Second" The value in this box is the number of times the simulation draws itself each second. A higher value will result in smoother animation. A lower value will allow ticks to be computed more rapidly.
• Brain Inspector:
  • The mouse can be used to pan (left mouse button, click and drag), zoom (scroll wheel).
  • Reset View: Re-centres the view of the neural network, and scales it to fit the entire network in the area.
  • UpdateLive: When checked, this option will calculate what the selected swimmer is sensing and re-draw the swimmers brain each tick. Blue nodes have a positive value, red nodes have a negative value. Connections can also be positive or negative, wider connections have a larger value, transparent connections are not currently in use. Sometimes a node will grow larger than normal, this implies it has a value > 1.
• Graphs:
  • Energy: The combined ammount of energy contained by all of a particular entity type. Currently the green line represents food pellet energy, and the blue line represents swimmer energy.
  • Mean Age: The average age (in ticks) of a particular energy type. Again green for food pellets, blue for swimmers.
  • Oldest: Tracks the age of the oldest entity for each type. An increasing diagonal line represents the continued aging of the current oldest entity. A drop implies that the oldest entity died and the age of the next oldest entity is lower.

Under the hood there have been a lot of tweaks to the genetics, improving the scope of what can mutate and evolve. Swimmers also now have "health" which can if completely lost, cause a swimmer to die. A swimmer that died from lack of health will transmute any remaining energy into a collection of "MeatChunks", and while there isn't anything that interactes with them yet, the intent is to allow predation to be a viable survival strategy in future updates.

Try it yourself: Trilobytes-Alpha-Release-002.7z

1. Download and unzip the folder,
2. Double click on "Trilobytes.exe".

Major features:

• Networks can now mutate their width and height, allowing senses and effectors more flexibility in their possible mutations,
• Swimmers now have a notion of their health, when below 100% they will expend energy to heal, when it reaches 0% they die,
• If a swimmer dies with more than 0 energy, the energy is converted into meat chunks, which slowly decay if uneaten,
• Lunar cycle, as yet unused but will be an available sense going forward, hopefully allowing disparate swimmers to coordinate behaviour,
• Base metabolism, swimmers now have a variable basic energy usage per tick, based on the size and complexity of their senses and effectors,
• Graphs are now configurable,
• New graphs, showing lunar cycle stage, average health, average metabolism, swimmer generation number and simulation tick performance,

The next stage of the project was to create a distributable release. Once this had been achieved, it was evident that a more polished set of controls were needed. This update therefore not only allows you to download and tinker with the simulation yourself, but it also contains a big update to the user interface.

Try it yourself: Trilobytes-Alpha-Release-001.7z

1. Download and unzip the folder,
2. Double click on "Trilobytes.exe".

Major features:

• Distributable release (Windows only for now),
• More graphs, with more conventional axes and better labelling,
• Controllable simulation speed & framerate,
• Buttons! Settings now more intuitive and easier to use,
• Brain Inspector improvements and view options.

There are still a few major items planned:

• The ability for swimmers to eat each other,
• Entities need to be movable and createable,
• Rendering options, to enable/disable senses, the quad-tree, and food spawners,
• Food spawners need to me movable, creatable and adjustable.

• Settings:
  • Reset: Removes all entities, sets time to 0 and respawns the default feeders and a number of default swimmers.
  • Spawn Food: A toggle switch, when pressed down (default) food will spawn in the simulation. When lifted, food will stop spawning.
  • Select Fittest: Searches the simulation for the swimmer with the most living descendants and selects it.
  • Follow: Each tick the Universe's view is adjusted so the selected swimmer is always in the centre.
• Simulation:
  • The mouse can be used to pan (left mouse button, click and drag), zoom (scroll wheel), and select a swimmer (right mouse button).
  • Pause: A toggle switch, the simulation will not progressed when this button is down.
  • Limit: A toggle switch, when pressed down, the simulation will not delay between ticks (default).
  • TPS: "Ticks per Second" The value in this box is the maximum number of simulation ticks to be computed per second. The limit is only applied if "Limit" (button to the left) is pressed down.
  • FPS: "Frames per Second" The value in this box is the number of times the simulation draws itself each second. A higher value will result in smoother animation. A lower value will allow ticks to be computed more rapidly.
• Brain Inspector:
  • The mouse can be used to pan (left mouse button, click and drag), zoom (scroll wheel).
  • Reset View: Re-centres the view of the neural network, and scales it to fit the entire network in the area.
  • UpdateLive: When checked, this option will calculate what the selected swimmer is sensing and re-draw the swimmers brain each tick. Blue nodes have a positive value, red nodes have a negative value. Connections can also be positive or negative, wider connections have a larger value, transparent connections are not currently in use. Sometimes a node will grow larger than normal, this implies it has a value > 1.
• Graphs:
  • Energy: The combined ammount of energy contained by all of a particular entity type. Currently the green line represents food pellet energy, and the blue line represents swimmer energy.
  • Mean Age: The average age (in ticks) of a particular energy type. Again green for food pellets, blue for swimmers.
  • Oldest: Tracks the age of the oldest entity for each type. An increasing diagonal line represents the continued aging of the current oldest entity. A drop implies that the oldest entity died and the age of the next oldest entity is lower.

While this is the first build that has been documented on this website, it is actually roughly the fourth major iteration of this project. I may retroactively document some older versions, however the pipeline for new features is quite big, so there should be plenty of future content.

Major features:

• Each swimmer has a fully simulated genome. Genes add abilities to the swimmer, like senses, pigments or limbs,
• Swimmers can combine their genomes to reproduce sexually, or they can reproduce a-sexually,
• A graph documents the total energy contained within all food pellets (green line) and all swimmers (blue line),
• The inner workings of a swimmer's neural network can be observed live, including all of the sensory inputs and all of the effector outputs,
• Swimmers can be followed, and the most fit swimmer can automatically be selected each time it changes.

This build is also notably lacking many things, next priorities include:

• An executable! So far the only way to run this is to build it yourself,
• Buttons! The GUI needs fleshing out, especially if I start distributing an executable,
• The ability for swimmers to eat each other,
• Entities need to be movable and create-able,