Picoworld

Simulate artificial life by creating particles and defining interaction rules.

Using the editor

In Picoworld [BBS], you have four different types of colored particles. Using the editor, you can define how many particles of each type to spawn and their interaction. You can do this by toggling the symbol in the editor until you reach the desired value.  

You can toggle by placing the cursor on a specific symbol and pressing the 🅾️ button.

You can control the population by toggling the crystal of a specific color. From 0 to max, we have the following symbols:

Interaction is defined in a 4x4 grid. Particles can either attract (green) or repel (red) one another. You can also control the strength of each force by toggling through the symbols:

Let's take this board as an example:

Here we spawned the max number of red particles, and a medium number of green particles. Red particles attract one another while repelling green ones. Interaction is not bidirectional. Red can repel green, but green can be attracted to red. 

Once you are happy with your config, you can start the simulation by pressing the ❎ button:

On artificial life

Artificial life (or ALife) is one of the most exciting fields of research right now. Try playing around different combinations to discover emergent patterns!

If you discovered interesting patterns, feel free to comment and attach a GIF below! Don't forget to screenshot the config that generated it!

Credits

Credits to MRMOTEXT for the 8-bit glyphs and Jeffrey Ventrella's Clusters project.