"When man wanted to fly, he first turned to natural example - the bird - to develop his early notions of how to accomplish this difficult task. Notable failures by Daedlus and numerous bird-like contraptions (ornithopters) at first pointed in the wrong direction, but eventually persistence and the abstraction of the appropriate knowledge (lift over an airfoil) resulted in successful glider and powered flight. In contrast to this example, isn't it peculiar that when man has tried to build machine to think, learn and adapt he has ignored and largely continues to ignore one of nature's most powerful examples of adaptation, genetics, and natural selection?" (David Goldberg)

Description

     This program is an attempt to emobdy the rules that are found in artificial life. artificial life is a subset of artificial intelligence.

     Artificial Life is the representation of biological phenomenon on the computer. A well known field of this is "Cellular Automata". This is basically just the simulation of cells. They live, they reproduce, they move, and they die. A good simulation that embodies this is "Conway's Game of Life".

     This program is similiar to "Conway's Game of Life" but yet it is very different. It takes "Conway's Game of Life" and applies it to a society (human society). This means there is a very different (and much larger) ruleset than in the original game. Things need to be taken into account such as the terrain, age, sex, culture, movement, etc.

     Artificial Society is a new term that was given to this new field. This program is an "Artifical Society" program. The rules are placed in the program (and are somewhat customizable). You then observe trends of what occurs (how the animals on the terrain move, for example). You can also find information on the individual animals or watch specific trends such as "wealth distribution". It is a bottom-up approach to anthropology. You place the rules and watch the trends and structures emerge

     The GUI that is used is GNOME. This is because the ease that it provides, and the author's personal preference. The rules should be customizable and the simulation can be paused/resumed. The terrain is a grid, and the circles inside them represent the terrain and the animals.

See detailed information link for more information on Artificial Life

News

12th May, 2000 - Another long absence, what can I say? Uni sucks. This is just a minor release. Nothing major really. Screenshots are the same. I also added a spliffy bevel'd text logo that I made myself (thanks to tigert's tutorial). Enjoy :)

9th April, 2000 - Sorry for the long 'absence' - I lost linux and was unable to get it back until very recently. But have no fear - I've been hacking away madly and have come up with gLife 0.2.0 - Check the sourceforge page for release notes and the download :)

25th Febuary, 2000 - Work continues (on CVS) for 0.2.0 - At this point, I recommend people try CVS and give me feedback :) Also added a .spec.in thanks to Julian (will make RPM creation easy for people). I'll prolly be going to GUADEC (March 15th-18th) thanks to HelixCode Inc. Try to catch me there if you're going :)

25th January, 2000 - Well - i've been back for a while. No code done, but I have some pretty 'major' ideas for gLife. Mainly, i'm gonna be doing a ton of graphics stuff manually to reduce memory usage. Thats priority #1 at the moment. Also, i have a personal diary up at http://www.advogato.org - Look for the person named 'rakholh'. I'll use this website for news and development not really related to me. Over there, I'll keep more personal stuff (i.e. its not gLife-related, it whats I work on in general). I also have a new idea which I may work on implementing - Basically separate the GUI from the application - that way you can run the application in the background, and occasionally check up on it using the GUI. What do you think? I want to get some more rulesets implemented though (random movement is sooo boring). Comments? Please email me :)

3rd January, 2000 - New mailing list created (glife-devel) - See the project website for more details

Old News...

Screenshots

Here is a screenshot of the main program (version 0.2.1) - click to enlarge.

Here is a screenshot of the preferences dialog (0.2.1) - click to enlarge

Click here for older screenshots.

Mailing List

There is a glife-devel mailing list - For more information go to the project website.

Download

Current Version:

The program can be obtained through Anonymous CVS. Follow the below steps to get the program for CVS:

Login Anonymously by:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.glife.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/glife login

Press "Enter" when the password dialog comes

Checkout the source:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.glife.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/glife co glife

Later you can change to the glife directory and just type:

cvs update -Pd

Requirements:

GNOME Libraries (www.gnome.org)

Libglade (www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome)

Credits

     The primary developer for this program is Ali Abdin (aliabdin@aucegypt.edu)

     A special thank you goes out to for providing space for this program.

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