Recent content by voodooattack

All units are arbitrary at this point. I use Chipmunk2D for physics and a stokes solver for fluid dynamics and a bit of glue I wrote myself in-between to approximate drag. The navier-stokes implementation is a bit slow, so the resolution for the solver can't exceed 64 (or 10x7.5 pixels per...

Organisms can now read and modify their own genome, and it will carry on to their offspring. I reduced the default mutation rate as a result. Here's an example, the organism's stack machine was overwriting (or inserting into) the genome at offset 0...

This version includes many, many fixes and optimisations! I also separated synapses into two categories: logical and mechanical. Logical synapses connect neurons to neurons, while mechanical ones are used as inputs for physical parts. This allows physical parts to freely act as regular neurons...

Thank you. They look stiff because they're represented by segmented chains of straight lines in the physics engine. It can be made more smooth by decreasing the length and increasing the segmentation. What people may learn is, in the end, up to them; but the basics of evolution, how neural...

I think I finally got fluid drag right!

Thanks. Here's an excerpt I posted elsewhere that will help everyone understand what's going on: The organisms you see are swimming in fluid (the red/green/yellow hues represent fluid velocity around them), all organisms are controlled via spiking artificial neural networks. All body parts...

Here is something that I've been working on for the past two weeks, it's in its early stages, although I've done a lot of work. Fair warning: this is really CPU intensive and will crush anything short of an i7. Do not open it with a handheld! http://cilium.codebuffalo.com/ Please check it out...

I'm not sure what's soft about using biological Ribosomes to assemble special RNA produced by a compiler application to build nanobots. It's all feasible in real life. As to where I take it from there, that's the start of a steep curve. The paragraph above is without context, so maybe that's...

It's not outside of it, it's an attempt to sabotage the limits on said realm. Given ambition, nanobots that could reproduce in geometric progression, and practically limitless computational power, how grand would you build? You got it right. I see your point; but the novella is done now, so...

Yes, but conventional thrust is inferior when moving a planet, and without artificial gravity, inertia would kill the pilots. Those are the main reasons why I chose this mechanism.

I understand. The term nanometric is used to describe things at the molecular scale throughout the novella. I found that the term microscopic was not sufficient, and the alternative — nanoscopic — wasn't that attractive. That part I deliberately left out to the imagination, but the idea in my...

I will. Thank you.

Thanks for reading this, and I agree. Pace is certainly a problem for me, and I'm not proud to say that it doesn't get better with the later chapters either. The way he built the specialised nanobots for material collection is sort of the way a programmer would go about it though: automate it...

Thank you. I might have to think of something else, then. Is there a specific part that put you off?

Yes, there's a small paragraph before that one that describes what it does in simpler wording, this detailed description is for readers knowledgeable in the relevant fields and interested in details. This whole novel is a big thought experiment, it contains actual theory intermixed with wild...