element33

I'm continuing my R&D of virtual creatures living in abstract spaces (like geometric graphs etc). The current project switches from graphs to fields. The creature ("Field Amoeba") lives in a field generated by repulsors (red dots, dangerous), an attractor (the food, green dot), and the creature's own preference for a radial rest shape. Its body is a point cloud driving anisotropic Voronoi cells, which align to the field. A single central "brain" point governs the navigation. It runs as a simulation Houdini. Main challenges:

1. Alpha shape extraction from a point cloud
2. Detection of body continuity (has a chunk been severed?)
3. Automated selection of "interesting" scenarios

Possible outcomes: creature gets the food, dies from accumulated damage, dies from catastrophic severing (~50% of the body lost at once), death when a red dot touches the "brain". The YT video walks through the Houdini setup, Voronoi R&D, then sample scenarios are shown.

I’m developing an idea called Competitive Organisms on Networks: AI agents constrained to geometric graphs (not free space), where the graph is a "habitat".

The current project is a 2-agent pursuit/evasion scenario: the prey must collect all food to win, the chaser must catch the prey to win.

The rule-based agents were created in Houdini (VEX). Then the environment was re-created in Unity to train ML agents.

- Verdict: both approaches can create competitive agents

- Biggest mistake: to equalize chances for the rule-based agents, I gave the chaser a small speed advantage. This, unintentionally, created a "super chaser" in Unity

- Takeaways: 1) better to equalize chances with environmental conditions, not advantages, 2) the environment defines the performance ceiling more than the brain "type": i.e. hand-coded vs ML agents.

The YT video walks through the setup, shows a few sample games and what was learned.

Seems like there's a conflict between the UI scale set in Houdini's Preferences dialog and the HOUDINI_UISCALE variable in houdini.env. I've now set the Preferences value to 1 and the HOUDINI_UISCALE variable to what I want. As of right now, the Houdini UI scale seems to work. I also have my custom DPI value set in Windows (for Win apps), which, I think, may add another factor to the DPI conflicts. As a person gets older, every day he faces the same question: "How do I set the fonts in this darn app so I can see stuff"