Crittersjs

Critters must catch food (green circles) and avoid dangers (red squares). The brain of each critter is a small feedforward neural network. Brains are trained using a genetic algorithm to simulate evolution. Every 10 seconds, the five best critters of the latest generation are sent to the simulation rendered on the web page.

See the demo.

This is a TypeScript port of my original critters project written in C.

Build Requirements

This project uses npm to install dependencies and perform the build.

Runtime Requirements

A web browser is required.

Node.js is also required to start the server for local testing.

Build Instructions

First, install the build depencies:

npm install --include=dev

Then, build the project:

npm run build

Output files are placed in the dist/ directory:

• critters.js is the main JavaScript file.
• critters-worker.js contains the code for the worker. No need to directly reference this one in any HTML file, but it is referenced by critters.js.
• Other files (HTML, CSS, etc.) are copied from the static/ directory.

Run Instructions

Once built, the dist/ directory contains the complete demo as a single web page (index.html) that loads the necessary script. One complication to keep in mind for local testing, however, is that some web browsers do not allow running a worker from a script loaded from a local file. See this Stack Overflow question for some more context.

The easiest option for local testing is to run the following:

npm run start

This starts a web server locally on port 8080 that serves the files from the dist/ directory, and then opens your default web browser at the right address. This requires a local installation of Node.js for the server.

If you prefer only starting the server and then opening your web browser yourself, run the following command instead:

npm run server

Then, navigate with your web browser of choice to http://127.0.0.1:8080.