ORBS

ORBS is a console based life simulator of orb entities written in C. It combines a simple 8-bit instruction set and respective simulator with a genetic algorithm.

The simulation

Each orb ('.', 'o', 'O') is essentially a little micro-processor with registers and status flags. The genome of the orb is it's instruction memory ("Havard architecture"). The world it is living in consists of other orbs and food ('+', '#').

If an orb hits food it eats the food automatically, which increases its score. Every, by the orb, executed instruction reduces it's score by a given amount. The score of an orb reaches 0 it dies. The score of an orb also determines whether it is able to reproduce itself or not. When two orbs meet, they reproduce if they are able to. Reproduction is performed by the genetic algorithm, creating two new orbs.

The simulator

The simulator is console based and offers different levels of interaction. The simulation can be paused by pressing the p key. This opens a shell allowing a more detailed analyses like the disassembly of the genome of an orb.

With w and s the simulation speed can be changed. The different parameters of the simulation like the mutation rate, can be configured via the command line or by providing a configuration file. For a documentation of the configurable parameters run:

./orbs --config-info

Build

In order to build orbs you need cmake (version >= 3.5), the GNU C libraries readline, argp (Mac OS) and optionally if you want to build the unit-tests google-test (version >= 1.8).

1. Install cmake:

   sudo apt install cmake # Ubuntu
   brew install cmake # Mac OS (brew)
   

2. Install readline and argp

   sudo apt install libreadline6-dev # Ubuntu
   brew install readline # Mac OS (brew)
   brew install argp-standalone # Mac OS (brew)
   

3. (Optional) Install google-test:

   wget https://github.com/google/googletest/archive/release-1.8.0.tar.gz
   tar -xzf release-1.8.0.tar.gz && cd googletest-release-1.8.0
   mkdir build && cd build
   cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=install -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=11
   make && make install
   export GTEST_ROOT=`pwd`/install
   export GMOCK_ROOT=$GTEST_ROOT
   

4. Configure and build orbs, default BUILD_TESTS=OFF:

   cd orbs;
   mkdir build && cd build;
   cmake ../ -DBUILD_TESTS=[ON/OFF]
   make
   

TODO

• Generate statistics/plots, e.g. avg. instruction usage over time
• Coloring for map, orbs, etc.
• Unit test for list
• Unit test for mm
• Unit test for stats
• Unit test for config
• Unit test for shell
• Unit test for map
• Unit test for orb