Soup of Life is an artificial life simulation with moving agents that have genomes, energy, and heritable traits like size, morphology, and behavior. Organisms are born, feed, reproduce with mutation, and die in a continuous 2D world with different ecological zones that bias evolution in different directions.
Unlike Conway’s Game of Life, which is a deterministic cellular automaton on a fixed grid, this is an evolving ecosystem. You see predator–prey dynamics, trait trade-offs, niche specialization, boom–bust cycles, and extinction events. There is no explicit notion of species. Lineages and niches emerge naturally from reproduction and environmental pressure.
For most people it works best if you go in unprepared and just watch what happens.
As someone who, indeed, went in unprepared to just to see what happens, I was also left wanting in knowing what exactly I was looking at. It all just looked arbitrarily random to me.
As I've heard it said regarding art, part of the appreciation comes from knowing _how_ it was made (and why), not merely from what was made. We don't appreciate Warhol's soup cans because they're soup cans -- it's everything else about them that makes it art.
So, my recommendation is, make the narrator a default panel on the opening screen. Give folks a narrative description of the events occurring up front, and then invite them to explore the work from there.
I actually got a lot of thoughtful feedback from Reddit after sharing this last week, and I’ve been iterating on it since. Figured it was worth sharing the updated version again.
It’s still very much an experiment. Best way to experience it is just to open it and watch a world unfold for a while.
I'd like more hover help to explain features, so i can read them while it runs. Next to 'Cognition' there is some help. I'd like that on all parameters.
And, would like to see results from multiple long term runs. Does it settle out in particular configurations over time?
And, need little more short description of what is going on, since it seems to cycle around different stability points and not really one life form take off.
Very interesting to watch, though I don't really have a great idea of what's going on most of the time. Performance seems to be fairly poor despite my system being pretty beefy (Ryzen 9 7950x3d). I see the performance monitor and notice that the render loop seems to fairly regularly exceed the latency for 60fps, despite this being a 'simple' task by modern standards. I'd give more helpful feedback as to why, but the minified code makes it hard to say.
Do you plan on monetizing this somehow? If not, open sourcing some, if not all, would be pretty cool, even if it weren't necessarily licensed in a way that others could 'take' it, if that's your concern. Nonetheless, a very cool project.
This is awesome. How do you integrate morphology into the simulation? Does morphology effect movement (via area friction or mass impact on momentum) or metabolism (via area/volume ratio)?
Spent a few minutes just watching worlds unfold. There's something meditative about it.
Curious about the performance issues Meegul mentioned. These simulations can be surprisingly compute-intensive once you add physics interactions between many entities. Would love to see the code if you ever open-source it.
Neat simulation, but something seems up with the traits. I have ended up with two lineages with ridiculously high "Predate" scores - one with over 10^22 "percent".
Also, it's currently running at 1 tick per second...
I'm not sure if it's a local issue or intended, but the dots change color when crossing different niches(?), like their color is filtered through the background pane. I would imagine the color of the dots represent specific species and shouldn't change color across environments.
@maybe-tomorrow out of curiosity, is my guess that this is made with help from codex correct? (I'm trying to keep up my sense for the different default aesthetics of the different models, but this one I'm not sure about)
Maybe off topic but this site feels very vibe coded to me. Doesn't mean it's necessarily slop, it seems interesting. But I guess it's just too much effort on the UI and other things like that which someone with a limited budget wouldn't spend time on (but an AI can) vs the core thing. Just an observation (and apologies if I'm wrong).
click the maze and you can watch flies genetically evolve brains to beat the level. Genetic algorithms beat every version of backprop and transformer architecture that I tried. Pause it and click one of the flies for a stunning visualization of its whole brain.
awesome work :)
some open questions i have:
- what are titans and giants?
- "micro-brains" and "learning" is always showing 0 for me..but on the "neural" section it shows some tiny ups on the brain graph, ...saying at the same time in the bigger box under the graph that 22% have micro-brains, while showing 0 in all other places for that number
- "Timeline" seems not to work, always showing "Timeline data will appear as the simulation progresses." also after 150k ticks
- regarding seasons: whats the meaning of "(2s)" for the conditions? Im assuming its a kind of countdown?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.5 ms ] threadSoup of Life is an artificial life simulation with moving agents that have genomes, energy, and heritable traits like size, morphology, and behavior. Organisms are born, feed, reproduce with mutation, and die in a continuous 2D world with different ecological zones that bias evolution in different directions.
Unlike Conway’s Game of Life, which is a deterministic cellular automaton on a fixed grid, this is an evolving ecosystem. You see predator–prey dynamics, trait trade-offs, niche specialization, boom–bust cycles, and extinction events. There is no explicit notion of species. Lineages and niches emerge naturally from reproduction and environmental pressure.
For most people it works best if you go in unprepared and just watch what happens.
As I've heard it said regarding art, part of the appreciation comes from knowing _how_ it was made (and why), not merely from what was made. We don't appreciate Warhol's soup cans because they're soup cans -- it's everything else about them that makes it art.
So, my recommendation is, make the narrator a default panel on the opening screen. Give folks a narrative description of the events occurring up front, and then invite them to explore the work from there.
It’s still very much an experiment. Best way to experience it is just to open it and watch a world unfold for a while.
I'd like more hover help to explain features, so i can read them while it runs. Next to 'Cognition' there is some help. I'd like that on all parameters.
And, would like to see results from multiple long term runs. Does it settle out in particular configurations over time?
And, need little more short description of what is going on, since it seems to cycle around different stability points and not really one life form take off.
Do you plan on monetizing this somehow? If not, open sourcing some, if not all, would be pretty cool, even if it weren't necessarily licensed in a way that others could 'take' it, if that's your concern. Nonetheless, a very cool project.
Curious about the performance issues Meegul mentioned. These simulations can be surprisingly compute-intensive once you add physics interactions between many entities. Would love to see the code if you ever open-source it.
Nice work.
Also, it's currently running at 1 tick per second...
https://soupof.life/concepts
It’s a living doc, but should answer quite some questions.
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8f39482c-b2c7-4bd6-8d47-4...
click the maze and you can watch flies genetically evolve brains to beat the level. Genetic algorithms beat every version of backprop and transformer architecture that I tried. Pause it and click one of the flies for a stunning visualization of its whole brain.
- "micro-brains" and "learning" is always showing 0 for me..but on the "neural" section it shows some tiny ups on the brain graph, ...saying at the same time in the bigger box under the graph that 22% have micro-brains, while showing 0 in all other places for that number
- "Timeline" seems not to work, always showing "Timeline data will appear as the simulation progresses." also after 150k ticks
- regarding seasons: whats the meaning of "(2s)" for the conditions? Im assuming its a kind of countdown?
- indicator "Food" always seems to show 100%