SALIS: A-life Simulator

SALIS simulation running on the V1 architecture with the ncurses user interface

Overview

SALIS is a platform for conducting artificial life experiments. It enables the development of Tierra-like virtual machines, with certain limitations. For newcomers, I recommend exploring Tierra first. The following resources provide valuable context and insight into the motivations and implementation of both Tierra and this project:

• Video about Tierra
• Read about Tierra

SALIS V1 Reimplementation

A fully functional clone of the V1 architecture for the SALIS virtual machine has been implemented using the tools available in this repository. For more information on the V1 architecture, including its similarities and differences with the original Tierra simulator, check out the following resources:

• SALIS V1 repository
• SALIS V1 introductory playlist

Usage

SALIS simulations are initialized using the provided salis.py python script. Use salis new [...] to start new simulations and salis load [...] to load saved simulations. For a full list of available arguments for each command, run salis new --help and salis load --help, respectively.

The python script compiles a temporary executable on the fly (compilation typically takes less than a second) based on the specified arguments and launches it immediately.

Different architectures can be implemented as standalone C templates in the arch/ directory. When creating a new simulation, you can select a specific architecture using the --arch argument.

Similarly, different user interfaces are implemented as C templates within the ui/ directory. For example, the curses UI launches a terminal-based simulation visualizer, allowing easy exploration of SALIS memory cores and processes. In contrast, the daemon UI provides minimal output, making it ideal for running SALIS as a background service. Unlike the --arch argument, you can choose a different --ui argument each time you load a saved simulation.

As an example, the following command will launch a new SALIS simulation with 4 copies of the 55a ancestor organisms pre-compiled in each memory core. It will use the salis-v1 architecture, run on 8 memory cores, with each core having a size of 2^22 bytes. The PRNG seed is set to 123456789:

user@host$ ./salis new -A55a -asalis-v1 -c8 -C4 -m22 -nworld-1 -s123456789 -o

Upon exit, the simulation state will be automatically saved to ${HOME}/.salis/world-1/. As long as the contents of this directory are not removed, you can reload the saved simulation with the following command:

user@host$ ./salis load -n world-1 -o

Requirements

• C compiler - ideally GCC
• Python3
• Jinja2 - installed globally or within an active virtual environment