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Watch cars evolve using genetic algorithm
- gus_massa 2y agoOld discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942757 (664 points | Jun 2013 | 169 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600486 (162 points | Nov 2015 | 57 comments)
- gavinsyancey 2y agoSo boxcar2d, but without flash. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196747
- robotnikman 2y agoI knew I had seen something like this over a decade ago!
- gield 2y agoThis html5 version has also been around for longer than a decade already. It's what inspired me to take a class on Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computing in university back then.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago...and apparently all the suspension parameters stripped out for some bizarre reason. The physics simulation clearly uses inelastic collisions, which is wildly unrealistic and why so many otherwise passable 'cars' don't pass the course. Also seems to use a very low coefficient of friction - most of my cars couldn't make it up a two-segement slope.
- gavinsyancey 2y ago... Apparently boxcar2d works perfectly in Ruffle, which the Internet Archive automatically loads :) https://web.archive.org/web/20240428203838/http://boxcar2d.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240428203838/http://boxcar2d.c...
- dustfinger 2y ago> evolve random two-wheeled shapes into cars over generations Where I come from, we call two-wheeled automobiles motorbikes. Very cool simulation though!
- dotancohen 2y agoThe simulation that these cars are driving in has no third dimension for the vehicle to fall over into (or where to put another pair of wheels). So, like a traditional four-wheeled car, these vehicles do not tip over at 0 velocity. I think that property is enough to qualify their behaviour as more similar to four-wheeled cars than motorbikes.
- xuhu 2y agoBtw, how much AI goes into designing the exterior of a car (panels, lights, windows, grill) ? Can they just drag a slider for "How much muscle do you want" from "Yes" to "Beige" ?
- AlotOfReading 2y agoVery little. It's heavily computer aided, but the overall design is largely done by humans with some marginal input by engineers for annoying realities like aerodynamics and sensors.
- speedgoose 2y agoI don’t think they use generative AI much in automotive design today, but you can play with stable diffusion and embeddings and make a slider for muscle cars in the textual weights.
- hinkley 2y agoWhy are the cars so spiky and why do they stay that way? Mostly what I saw was the wheels move and change size.
- Delk 2y agoLooks like their shape is always defined by eight triangles. The page doesn't say what the genome defines about those triangles (only that there are eight vertices in the genome), but if it's just random angles and distances, it'd kind of make sense that they start as random spiky shapes. I don't know why they stay that way. My first thought would be that it might be beneficial for the shape to be relatively low for stability, but with the shape between the wheels being concave for clearance. That doesn't quite seem to happen, except for the concave clearance to an extent. Maybe the rest of the shape doesn't really matter for the simulation, so there's no selective pressure towards not having a spiky shape.
- hinkley 2y agoBoth runs I did the cars looked like a child drawing a car from Mad Max. My best guess is sort of adjacent to yours: a lot of cars flip on the initial drop and I think the spikes are helping them land right side up. Overfitting T=[0,1]
- adrianmonk 2y agoA big spike sticking out the top could change the center of mass and the moment of inertia. Both of those could affect how the car handles even if the spike never touches anything. Oh, and they can affect the mass. If the grip of the wheels takes into account the normal force, extra weight may help with traction. Hmm, and a 4th thing: some cars have a spike sticking out back behind the back wheels. These spikes sometimes function like wheelie bars, which are used on drag racers to prevent the car from flipping if the front end lifts off the ground. The wheelie bar kind of braces it but also lifts the traction wheels off the ground so they stop rotating it at the wrong moment.
- jmole 2y agothis is fun, even though the speed controls aren't super intuitive. You can press "Surprise" to speed things up and go through a bunch of iterations quickly. The mutation rate (likelihood that g changes) and mutation size (Δg) are fun hyperparameters to tweak while watching the population evolve over time. It would be interesting to see a gene for "compliance" so the cars could have some kind of suspension. EVerything more or less evolved into a sort of tron-bike shape for most of the runs I tried.
- canjobear 2y ago> EVerything more or less evolved into a sort of tron-bike shape for most of the runs I tried. I ran it in the background for a very high mutation rate for a long time and it managed to come up with something very different---a little wheel attached to a big wheel, which bounces around and goes over all the obstacles.
- dexderp 2y agoInteresting. Is there a way to do this in a 3d physics based simulation environment. It would be cool to see if a genetic algorithm could be used to discover new aerodynamic configurations for drones/other platforms in simulation. I don't know enough about genetic algorithms to say for certain. Anyone have any reference materials for someone that's just started looking into this?
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- jasonwatkinspdx 2y agoNot exactly what you're asking but Topology Optimization is now a standard feature of the big CAD packages. It allows the designer to express various constraints and goals, then a combination of gradient methods and genetical algorithms are used to find an optimized part. Example: https://www.solidworks.com/media/topology-optimization https://www.solidworks.com/media/topology-optimization
- msarchet 2y agoIt’s the simulation and fitness function that are difficul not the genetic algorithm really. I’ve done a bunch of playing around with NEAT, a variant of GA using NNs, for various things. Typically for GA stuff though you have a genome, aka some set of instructions for an individual, a fitness function for scoring them, and then you generate new individuals from those genomes for the next population. Original Paper on NEAT here: https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/stanley.ec02.pdf https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/stanley.ec02.pdf Lots of good resources here. https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/ https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/
- orthecreedence 2y agoI love the NEAT algorithm. I did version of it for my senior project in high school, and have done a few iterations since, mostly with bugs that eat food and avoid predators. I'm about due for another round.
- pjs_ 2y agoI wrote the original version of this nearly 20 years ago. Cool to see it still pop up here from time to time. Still runs in the browser thanks to Ruffle: https://peteshadbolt.co.uk/posts/ga/ https://peteshadbolt.co.uk/posts/ga/
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- b800h 2y agoOn Firefox here, the "Save Local Population" option seems to crash. Any idea why that might be happening? (Amazing site btw - every time it pops up I end up spending much too long with it).
- cpeterso 2y agoWhere do you see the "Save Local Population" option? When you say it "seems to crash", do you mean Firefox or the Flash animation?
- s1k3s 2y agoWhat would be the consequences of adding a hitbox on the structure (or springs?) as well, as opposed to having it only on the load?
- CasperH2O 2y agoDo you have some examples of results when running this for a few days? Or perhaps, 20 years? ;-)
- nickpsecurity 2y agoOr another civilization wrote it a few, billion years ago. We might see the results fly by our planet this week.
- zamadatix 2y agoI remember running this in the background any time I was in the computer lab at school. Thanks for making this back in the day :). There were a few genetic algorithm "polygons approximate picture" pages back in that era as well.
- Genbox 2y agoIt references Box2D as the physics engine, but it seems to be a JavaScript port of Box2D. I'm unfamiliar with the JavaScript ports, but if it is a copy of one of the existing ports, the port should be referenced instead.
- iancmceachern 2y agoReminds me of that game Detroit
- logicprog 2y agoI spent hours as a kid playing with Boxcar 2D. This brings back memories, and I'm not even that old!
- jeffbee 2y agoOr "overfitting as a service".
- lwansbrough 2y agoHow many generations does it take to start destroying communities? :)
- Applejinx 2y agoThis isn't genetic algorithm, though. It's mutation. To do it with a serious model of a genetic algorithm, you need crossover, not mutation. It's fun, but this is sort of a lottery of randomized cars with some capacity for copying winning ones over to successive runs. Breed the cars ;)
- drooby 2y agoWhy is this not a genetic algorithm? Genetic evolution does not require crossover.
- adrianmonk 2y agoIt does have crossover, doesn't it? There's a GitHub link at the bottom which gives us this: https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/src/machine-learning/genetic-algorithm/manage-round.js https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/src/... And that seems to call into createCrossBreed() in here: https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/src/machine-learning/create-instance.js https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/src/... And that gets a parentChooser callback, which seems to be cw_chooserParent() from here: https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/src/generation-config/pickParent.js https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/src/... And that has some swap points and a thing that toggles between parents when some index matches one of two values. I'm not really a JS programmer or a GA expert, but it looks like crossover to me.
- ryandrake 2y agoIt seems to always get into a rut where one design lucks out and dominates generation after generation, with no mutations producing anything even close to working. Like, the top ten don't change after hundreds of generations. Maybe this is just an attribute of genetic algorithms. They quickly zero in on something kind of good, and then get stuck at this local maxima. Or maybe I need to just play around with the Mutation Rate and Mutation Size settings.
- klyrs 2y agoSounds like you're running with a single elite clone. That's a really bad idea in genetic heuristics for exactly the phenomenon you mention.
- hhmc 2y agoIs the correct number 0 or >1?
- klyrs 2y agoNote my use of the term "heuristic" and not "algorithm." There is not a correct number. The correct approach is to fiddle with the parameters; record good populations; occasionally restart from scratch... we call this "hyperparameter tuning" to make ourselves feel better about the process.
- thfuran 2y ago>Maybe this is just an attribute of genetic algorithms It happened to crocodiles and it could happen to you too.
- keanebean86 2y agoCrabs too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- iamgopal 2y agoMore improvement needs wild environment changes.
- fredoralive 2y agoConsidering the 2D nature of the simulation, aren't they more motorbikes than cars?
- adrianmonk 2y agoOr maybe they are cars rather than motorbikes, if a bike is a vehicle that requires balance to stay vertical.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoFunny how the landscape never changes, even though the generations come and go.
- Sander_Marechal 2y agoIt's an option on the page to change the landscape
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoThanks, I didn't see it.
- khqc 2y agoSlight bug: there's no road past about 280m, all cars fall into an endless pit
- ketralnis 2y agoTime comes for us all
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoThe Great Filter
- harshaxnim 2y agoJust wait a little longer for the flying cars.
- anonu 2y agoso whats the optimal design?
- quectophoton 2y agoProbably just two wheels and almost no "body". That, or one BIG wheel, a very tiny second wheel, and almost no "body".
- aqfamnzc 2y agoReminds me of a phenomenal Android app called Cell Lab where you could create all kinds of multi- or single-celled organisms to live in a petri dish. You could crank up the radiation levels to let things mutate and evolve if so desired.
- hereme888 2y agoOk, that's proof evolution isn't real. lol
- thephyber 2y agoDid the worst candidate make the longest distance?
- trekhleb 2y agoIt is a very visual and entertaining visualization, I love it. It inspired me to experiment with a genetic algorithm in "Self-parking car evolution": https://trekhleb.dev/self-parking-car-evolution/ https://trekhleb.dev/self-parking-car-evolution/
- amenghra 2y agoReminds me dirt bike on Apple Macintosh -- you could edit pretty much every aspect of your dirt bike. Would be fun to make a car/bike game where you play against the GA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siiho5IVAdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siiho5IVAdg
- sssilver 2y agoAm I correct that it’s impossible for this system to evolve any kind of a suspension mechanism, no matter what the mutation parameters are?
- nullc 2y agomight go much faster if it recorded a set of states where ancestors died shortly after and then test all the new candidates against those states. The new candidate might actually survive because its prior history kept it from ever getting into that particular death state, but I think biasing towards designs that don't immediately die in those hard cases is good anyways, since given a long enough run it would likely encounter a similar state. One could co-evolve the test case collection by simulating only the best candidates according to the test cases, and then retaining test cases based on a running score for how well they predicted the actual performance.
- mywittyname 2y agoRecessive genes, essentially.
- diydsp 2y agoIf you like things like this, join us at https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchMachinesLearn/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchMachinesLearn/
- huhtenberg 2y agoCool topic, but it doesn't seem to be a terribly active sub. The newest post is from 3 years ago :-/