That's awesome! Thanks for sharing the video!

As long as the mutation rate is greater than zero, there is always the possibility that a creatures manages to mutate its way out of a local maximum. I haven't seen that happen myself, but to be fair, the majority of my time on this project was spent implementing it and not experimenting with long-running simulations.

What I would recommend is to try to play around with different selection, recombination and mutation algorithms and to increase the mutation rate when the fitness starts to stagnate. The settings that lead to the most randomized simulation behaviour (which can be exactly what you need if you're stuck in a local maximum) are
uniform selection
uniform recombination and 
global mutation
with a  mutation rate of 100%.

As far as the network size is concerned, I have seen some very interesting results with networks about the size that you have chosen. Sometimes with even more intermediate nodes (but not with more layers). I haven't seen too many successful simulation results with very deep networks. You might get lucky and immediately start off with one that works really well, but it's a lot more unlikely than with smaller networks.

The network inputs include the average rotation of all bones which can give the creature some sense of rotation. Additionally, the creatures cast rays into the world in order to learn about the distance from their surroundings. Some of these rays have a fixed direction (e.g. up and forward) but one of them is controlled by a neural network output of the creature itself. It could therefore also use the information it gets from these rays in order to determine its current orientation in space.

Thanks! Yeah, a Linux build even existing is as much support as I can / want to offer for it. It also lacks some features: http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/linux/

Glad to hear that it works, though.

Is it possible to disable some of the dashboard notifications? Specifically, I would like to disable notifications about new followers and builds that have completed processing.

I know about the e-mail notification settings but wasn't able to find anything regarding dashboard notifications.

You must have missed this sign, it's right by the entrance.

Jokes aside, you're not supposed to jump to the other floors - it ruins the illusion. I guess I forgot to prevent you from being able to do that. At the current rate of updates for this app, I'd say this is going to be fixed in about 2 years. 

Thanks for letting me know about this issue, though!

I've been in sporadic contact with Jonathan since 2015. I wasn't just loading content from his website without his permission :)

In fact, a very early release of this 3D library used to be hosted on libraryofbabel.info http://libraryofbabel.info/lob3d.html. I'm guessing that it has gotten lost during the recent time of technical difficulties that the site went through (same as with the old forum).

With the most recent update I added my own algorithm for generating the pages in the library instead of loading them from libraryofbabel.info. This makes the apps work completely offline and also allows me to host a browser version here on itch.io without having to deal with cross-origin resource sharing issues. It also makes the pages show up a lot faster.

The pages are going to be in different locations since Jonathan's implementation of libraryofbabel.info is not publicly available and I would need to know all of the details and exact parameters that he uses in order for me to make the pages show up in the exact same locations. Both algorithms are mostly based on the same concepts, though.

You can find my implementation here:
https://github.com/keiwando/libraryofbabel3D

All pages are loaded through libraryofbabel.info, which appears to have been down for the past couple of days.
It seems like Jonathan is working on fixing it, though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BabelForum/comments/eewgjs/the_website_is_down_right_no...

As soon as the website is up and running again, the pages should show up in this 3D version as well. Sorry for the confusion and thanks for letting me know about this issue!

Which operating system? Windows? Is it something like this: https://itch.io/post/981372

Thank you very much, Tom! I appreciate it!

http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/best-creature-stats/

Glad to hear that it works now. Sorry about that bug!

I just uploaded a new Windows version, which should hopefully fix the issue. Can you please follow these steps and the let me know if it worked or not:

(You might not need to do all three of these steps - do them one at a time, try again and stop as soon as the editor works again.)

1. Go to C:\User\YourUser\AppData\LocalLow\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution and delete the CreatureSaves folder.
2. Open regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution and delete the entries that begin with "LAST_CREATURE_DESIGN_KEY" and "DID_MIGRATE_CREATURE_SAVES_KEY".
3. If both steps above didn't fix the issue yet, delete the whole Evolution folder in your registry using regedit.

I just uploaded a new Windows version, which should hopefully fix the issue. Can you please follow these steps and the let me know if it worked or not:

(You might not need to do all three of these steps - do them one at a time, try again and stop as soon as the editor works again.)

1. Go to C:\User\YourUser\AppData\LocalLow\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution and delete the CreatureSaves folder.
2. Open regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution and delete the entries that begin with "LAST_CREATURE_DESIGN_KEY" and "DID_MIGRATE_CREATURE_SAVES_KEY".
3. If both steps above didn't fix the issue yet, delete the whole Evolution folder in your registry using regedit.

I just uploaded a new Windows version, which should hopefully fix the issue. Can you please follow these steps and the let me know if it worked or not:

(You might not need to do all three of these steps - do them one at a time, try again and stop as soon as the editor works again.)

1. Go to C:\User\YourUser\AppData\LocalLow\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution and delete the CreatureSaves folder.
2. Open regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution and delete the entries that begin with "LAST_CREATURE_DESIGN_KEY" and "DID_MIGRATE_CREATURE_SAVES_KEY".
3. If both steps above didn't fix the issue yet, delete the whole Evolution folder in your registry using regedit.

It looks like the registry solution I described above should work and fix this issue (with the downside that you would lose old creature designs). You can try to first remove only the entry with the key that begins with "_CreatureNames" from the registry. That should probably be enough. If not, then remove the entire Evolution folder from your registry. That will be act like a fresh install.

Thanks! It looks like something has crashed in the background. Can you maybe send me the Unity log file? You can find it here:
C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\LocalLow\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution\Player.log

If you like you can also just try to delete the Evolution settings data from the Windows registry:
HKCU\Software\Keiwan Donyagard\Evolution

This will also delete all of your previously saved creature designs (saved before the last update), so maybe create a backup if you care about those.

What exactly do you mean by 'does not work'? What happens if you click on them? Do they move to show that they have been selected? Can you not place joints, bones or muscles?

http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/best-creature-stats/

There is no audio at all in this simulator, so I'm not quite sure what you mean.

I'm not going to just copy Code Bullet's ideas ;)

Both Undo & Redo and a selection tool will be part of the upcoming update :) I've already finished implementing Undo & Redo.

http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/glitch-fix/ has a rough explanation why I haven't "fixed" this issue, which is essentially a continuation of http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/glitch/ (I know that you're not focused on the fact that you can reach 100% fitness with this bug, which is the main focus of the second link, but it's the same issue and a setup for the FAQ of the first link)

You can enable the "Keep best creatures" option already, which guarantees to carry the best two creatures to the next generation without any change to their genes whatsoever (no recombination or mutation). You might still see slight fitness drops and variations though, as explained here: http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/fitness-drop/ 

Great catch, thanks! I'll fix this with the next update.

I was finally able to finish this one: http://keiwando.com/evolution/faq/

This is great! Thank you very much for this post!

I created an FAQ page with answers to the most commonly asked questions about "Evolution":

keiwando.com/evolution/faq/

Hi Bruno,

I hope you're doing well!

I finally managed to finish the FAQs. If you would like to see me elaborate on any of the answers there, just let me know and I'll add more information.

Best regards, 

Keiwan 

It's a quick an easy way to exit the library, inspired by the fact that in the short story, the bodies of the dead librarians are thrown over the railings into the endless abyss.

So what resolution does your monitor have and what resolution were you trying select?

https://itch.io/t/202297/additional-statistics

The version number you see here on itch.io is not the actual version number of the simulator. itch.io just shows you how many files I‘ve uploaded for a certain platform. I only recently began to include Linux builds at all. All of those builds have the same version. 

That being said, I won‘t be fixing any Linux-specific bugs and the Linux build might be missing some features here and there. That‘s the only condition under which I‘m able to offer a Linux version at all. It‘s either this or no Linux version. 

This feature will be part of the next big update. I've already implemented it but there's a lot more that I'm adding in this update and I'm also quite busy with other projects and work at the moment, so it'll unfortunately take a little while before the new version gets released.

Thanks for the patience!

Go to the settings (the gear icon) and then click on the brain at the bottom. You can change the number of network layers and the number of nodes per layer.

Yes, I removed the evolution-core submodule and re-integrated all the scripts into the same repository. Man, was that submodule annoying to work with.

The only reason why the "evolution-core" submodule existed at all was because I played around with making a "true" 3D version of this simulator (possibly with AR integration) in a separate app and I wanted to reuse most of the existing scripts. The submodule allowed me to do just that but it was still a significant overhead. If I ever decide to make a 3D version of this, I'll just add it to the current app (it's probably not going to happen though).

Does this same creature design consistently glitch out in the current released version (other than Android)? If so, then the glitch wasn't introduced in the Optimization branch. There were definitely glitches happening before but they definitely increased drastically after my optimization attempts. 

I'm in the process of adding import and export functionality to both creature designs and simulation save files. I'll let you know once that's ready so you can send me this design to test with.

I fixed the weird glitches that happened on the Optimization branch yesterday. (I also upgraded the project to Unity 2018.2 and reorganized the scripts a little bit). It's all merged into the master branch at the moment, if you're still interested. Thanks again for confirming the TextMesh instructions, they worked for me as well.

The problem was that I had forgotten to also reset the MuscleJoint rigidbodies when resetting the bones, which caused them to disconnect and glitch out.

I'm now working on the next big release with tons of new features that I'm very excited about.  

The short answers to your questions are the following:

The muscles work by applying force to the bones that they are connected to. The magnitude and direction (expansion vs contraction) of that force  is determined by the neural network output. Internally they use the Spring Joint component of Unity's physics system, which essentially acts like a real spring. The muscles fire at a constant rate.

Thank you very much for all of your questions! (I've also seen the other batch but haven't had time to appropriately answer them yet) I'm currently  working on not only a big update for Evolution but also a FAQ page on my website where I will try to answer all of these questions and others that I've been getting in more detail, so that I can then just link to those answers when someone asks them again. If you or your students have any more questions, just drop them here in this forum or send me an e-mail and I'll add them to my list of questions for the FAQ. 

I'll let you know once that page is ready (I'm a little busy at the moment so it might take a while).

Here are two instances I just quickly found: https://itch.io/post/434189 https://twitter.com/moonscript/status/732941480206049281

I definitely also remember there being more examples, since I specifically researched this question of potential payout fees a lot (around the beginning of this year).

I fully understand that the TOS have always given you the potential to apply any additional fees before making a payout, I have read them entirely. My point is that you have communicated something else, are now going against that and officially introducing new fees (perfectly okay) but also applying them retroactively (not okay).

Let's have an example. You are currently not charging a fixed hosting fee, but have instead implemented your "Open revenue sharing" model. You still have to pay hosting fees yourself, I think everybody knows that. Your TOS give you the option to deduct these fees from every payout but you have communicated that you don't. Based on this information people are deciding on a revenue share. Now, you could come along and replace the open revenue sharing model with a fixed percentage fee, but then saying "Well, we've always had to pay hosting fees, so now you're going to have to retroactively pay them as well" would again be unacceptable (even though technically in accordance with your TOS). It's a communication and trust issue.

As I've also tried to stress before, (at least to me) this is absolutely not about the amount of extra fees I've had to pay. As you said yourself, it was not that much in the grand scheme of things, which then again makes me understand even less why you didn't decide to just waive them as well instead of setting the precedent of introducing new fees against what was communicated and retroactively applying them.

Quick sidenote, since I just noticed it: The link for "Read more about PayPal fees" here is broken.