Multiplayer Genetic Cars

http://gencar.co

by gwil • 13 years ago

114 65 13 years ago

gencar.co

jstanley• 13 years ago

Is this based at all on the HTML5 genetic cars project submitted the other day?

Ashuu• 13 years ago

Looks very similar! But better!

pubnub24• 13 years ago

This is an improvement over the original with Distributed Computing. The more players there are, the faster the best car is discovered. We want as many players as possible to find the BEST CAR faster than ever possible before.

DanBC• 13 years ago

The page give credits to the various projects.

* Loosely based on BoxCar2D, but written from scratch, only using the same physics engine (box2d). seedrandom.js written by David Bau. (thanks!)*

An old very popular page is this one (http://www.qubit.devisland.net/ga/index.html)

BoxCard2D (http://www.boxcar2d.com/)

kayge• 13 years ago

Link to the previous project[1] / discussion[2] / highscores ;) [3] for anyone who's interested:

[1]http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942757

[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943374

eterm3• 13 years ago

One problem is that everyone shares their best, which becomes someone else's best, which then gets shared. Very quickly all my cars are all the same car ID.

It needs a way to prevent 2 identical copies racing each other.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Looking into this shortly.

MWil2• 13 years ago

The go button is not working for me (firefox 22)

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Thank you for the detail we are fixing this ASAP.

MWil2• 13 years ago

All buttons seem to work well when it first loads but then over time (generations) they seem to require a reload to work again.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

FireFox 21 is working as expected can you provide more details?

jsnell2• 13 years ago

I don't think this idea works. All players will very soon have the same top car (or the descendant of the same top car), and get a copy of that car from all other players. This creates a massively inbred mono-population.

Not sure what the appropriate fix would be. Import the top car from one random player in each generation?

eterm3• 13 years ago

Given the cars are seeded (e.g. f0660f), simply importing the top n different seeds in the world pool would be enough. Right now the system is treating everyone's copies of f0660f as if they are different cars, but they are not.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

f0660f is the top winner for World-2 right now. You will want to switch worlds! Also the cars are all slightly different if you look closely.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

We are working on adjusting the algorithm.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

And yet, isn't having the strongest species the goal of an evolutionary algorithm? Having multiple players do multiple runs (parallelization) and ending up with the same / a similar species sounds like a goal to me.

Perhaps you'd like to see more varied species get comparable end-results, but I think you'll need a more varied obstacle course / 'goals' in that case.

coderzach• 13 years ago

The issue is that you'll hit a local optimum, and all progress will halt.

deletes2• 13 years ago

Is the world based on the same map(terrain) or the same pool of cars?

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Same pool of champion cars that work best across a similar terrain.

deletes2• 13 years ago

Identical terrain for the example `PubNub-World-2`?

EDIT: Looks identical to me.

>Join World: The same seed always creates the same track, so you can agree on a seed with your friends and compete. :)<<

artjumble• 13 years ago

So did you ask Rafael Matsunaga if you could copy and release his code as open source?

shmageggy• 13 years ago

Seriously. They even copied his text verbatim. The original code didn't mention any license which I don't think means it's a free-for-all. Also, they apparently copied the code before he pushed a bug-fix I emailed him yesterday :)

the_prestige• 13 years ago

So do you know what the license is. I'm planning to fork this awesomeness for some other variants, and I'm sure others are thinking about that too.

Duelist• 13 years ago

https://github.com/pubnub/genetic-car-2/commit/dfbcd85712a93...

Seems like an afterthought. I couldn't find any license on the original either.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

We are working on improvements to the Genetic Algorithm! Updates Shortly.

profquail• 13 years ago

You might be able to further increase performance with parallel.js[1]:

[1] http://adambom.github.io/parallel.js/

pubnub24• 13 years ago

This looks like it may work out! Looking into it a bit more.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

We've pushed a few updates but are still working on making improvements! Soon a Chat feature will be added too....

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Adding the chat shortly and we will change the world number again.

FORK us - https://github.com/pubnub/genetic-car-2

hyramgraff• 13 years ago

I've found the the string "HN" generates a nice but challenging world.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Tried it here at the office, Yes it is challenging indeed.

talmir• 13 years ago

Hangnig out at HN as well :)

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

It seems a bit opaque/confusing. Pretty soon everyone seems to be based on the same root 'genome' and you can't even tell which cars are 'yours' so to speak. Likewise, you can't wall off your own gene pool so that it doesn't get cross-contaminated.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

We added the "Your Car" label which is mutated based on the current Champion of the World. We are working on improving the manipulation capabilities for Intelligent Design.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

We just pushed a new update go check it out. Upgraded Chat. Soon to come is a Intelligent Design (God Mode).

ndr• 13 years ago

Now put a js based bitcoin miner on the background and you're done.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Haha good idea. >: D

alan_cx3• 13 years ago

Probably missing something ...

Which is my car? Is it competing? If so, against who? How can I tell? I have no idea what Im looking at, which is my car, who Im competing against, who is doing well.

Is there some sort of dummies guide for the likes of me???? :)

Despite all that, Im mesmerized!!!

Edit: I see down votes? How is it wrong to not understand something and ask for some help. Why is that a down vote?

pubnub24• 13 years ago

Good question! See "Your Car" in the list of car health meters.

alan_cx3• 13 years ago

Yes. Its all of the health meters.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

VERSION 2.35 UPDATED!

qwerty_asdf2• 13 years ago

Let's all coordinate on the "HackerNews" world.

Join World: HackerNews

webjprgm• 13 years ago

I've been watching "PubNub-World-4" for a while (28 generations, animation is still on). It has a nasty hill to climb that stops all cars at about 160 meters. I saw one almost make it over. So now I don't want to refresh and lose the chance that one might eventually evolve to make it.

Most of the cars seem to be quite similar, though. Also, the one that almost made it over doesn't seem to be marked as the leader so there's no net improvement in the cars. I saw one more, in about Gen 30, almost make it over too (it jumps up and sits on the ledge a while before falling back, as opposed to not getting past the ledge or jumping straight up in the air and falling back down).

Very mesmerizing thing.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

After some improvements on the multiplayer aspects we are starting to see better generations being created and breading between champions.

dta5003• 13 years ago

Watch out for the XSS in the chat.

alan_cx3• 13 years ago

Yeah. I've been sat here watching people trying it as they update the site to combat it.

Still dont know what Im looking at though...

qwerty_asdf2• 13 years ago

Hmmm... people are complaining about their browsers mysteriously crashing, interspersed with random strings of Russian conversation...

pubnub24• 13 years ago

fixed!

mistercow• 13 years ago

This is a neat idea, although currently I can't really figure out what the deal is. It seems that I'll have a really effective car, and then the next round, I'll end up with a completely new set of cars, none of which resemble the previous winner, and all of which are less effective.

Anyway, would would be really cool to see would be something like Picbreeder, but for cars, where you can manually choose which cars to breed, then let them evolve on different courses, etc. Having some extra control over the situation would make for something extremely addictive.

pubnub24• 13 years ago

good call!

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Ummm can someone explain to me what exactly is going on here?

pubnub24• 13 years ago

This game is connected to the world, all players are sharing their best cars each game round. Only the dominant cars win. The TOP car from each player in the world is added to your car list each game cycle. This car is therefore added to your gene pool and is then genetically spliced and paired with your other cars. Top cars are transmitted around the world from other players who are online RIGHT NOW using WebSockets style technology for data streaming ( PubNub ).

Ra1d3n• 13 years ago

Im hitting performance problems after about 5 minutes. I get massive lags. Running on latest Chrome i5 3.4GHz x 4 and 8GB RAM.

Edit: Just press "New Population" a few times and watch your browser slow down. There is a memory leak somewhere.

emehrkay• 13 years ago

Hmm, things started off interesting with the best car i've seen thus far (short, wheels covered the top and bottom, etc) then this

http://imgur.com/a/XFCYZ

extrapolate• 13 years ago

The track/car generation is done through JS, so some modifications aren't anything Chrome Dev Tools can't handle. Add to that the fact that the "best" car is populated into the gene pools of all the other users and that's the outcome.

ynniv• 13 years ago

The biggest problem here is a lack of server-side validation. The "remote champion" is determined by the score claimed by a client, so set a breakpoint in the function that posts the score and you can claim that any car parameters achieved any score... You see where this is going.

A proper implementation would run the simulation server-side to verify that a configuration achieves a high score. Almost as good would be to rank configurations based on the average runs across clients. This still lets a client submit an absurd configuration, but won't let an inferior configuration continue to be "champion".

Multiplayer Genetic Cars

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