History
The Ancestry of Evagents is a full one. In its current state, it is an efficient, Windows optimized, natural selection simulator, but it wasn't always. I'll try to relate the story of how we got here.
In the beginning, there was Will Wright. The founder of the simulation gaming company Maxis, and dreamer of creating a whole universe inside a computer. Some may remember he was the leader of the team behind the idea that became the game Spore, before EA took over and reduced its complexity until it was no more than a child's toy. After that mess was released, a huge number of Maxis fans decided to try and make their own universe-simulating game. Some founded a forum centered around a game they wanted to call "Thrive". This attracted the membership of one Andrej Karpathy, a young AI programmer with a curiosity for natural selection, who built a simulator with a very basic neural net, agents that needed to stay between 0 and 200 health, and the ability to see and collect dots of food.
This video and the code was shared with the dev team for Thrive, but as time went on they started to doubt their ability to make code that would have mutable creatures and focused more on designing the tools for making creatures rather than natural selection. This strategy was incompatible with this simulator's core concepts, and while some of the developers stuck with trying to make a Spore copy-cat, Andrej focused on the natural selection and neural net elements, and soon came out with "Social Bots".
In this version the bots were now allowed to hunt each other, and were rewarded with health for stabbing others. This direct-reward for carnivores stayed in the program well into its Scriptbots phase. The natural selection pressure was strong, as any agent that couldn't avoid its young was doomed to fail. It led to development of the once-common "hunting pack", circles of agents that would lunge out after prey, and only prey. With the addition of herbivore/carnivore dichotomy, Scriptbots was born.
At this point, the Google group was founded, and took off with much support. Many people joined the "dev team", if one could call it that, since we were really just a loose group of C++ enthusiasts tweaking an evolution sim. Several of us contributed in huge ways: Casey Link re-wrote the program in a modularized form (greatly needed and appreciated), David Coleman began working on optimization and super-computing potential, and I made changes to the art style, functionality, and settings. As for myself (Julian Hershey), I initially forked a version that wasn't modularized, so I got stuck in a depreciated version with no hope of reconciliation, and I was hardly a pro at GitHub at the time. Eventually I came around and rebuilt some of my changes, most especially the fixes and tweaks, until I finally figured out how the modularized version worked. After that, I got to work!... over the course of several years...
This is where I finally diverged from the original creation and intention. Now I was trying to simulate communication and specitation, and took the focus off meat and food collection. Layers were introduced, new features like lung types, jumping, and variable radius were introduced, Meat stopped being an automatic reward, and bot outputs got smoothed and the brain changed over and over again to find a nice balance of practicality and function. Years of development and tinkering have now led us to rebranding under the name Evagents, and now, version 0.06...
The work is not over yet; rather, it is just beginning anew under the Evagents Project. Maybe if we do well enough, this legacy of a universe simulator will continue another few years.
Footnote: Curious what has become of the founder of Scriptbots, Andrej Karpathy? Check out the Links page!