smeagol

The name is a faulty homonym — Sméagol (Gollum, Lord of the Rings) sounds like Golem.

An attempted recreation of The Golem Project — Automatic Design and Manufacture of Robotic Lifeforms by Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack, CS Dept., Brandeis University.

• Project page: http://demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/
• Paper: H. Lipson and J. B. Pollack (2000), "Automatic design and Manufacture of Robotic Lifeforms", Nature 406, pp. 974–978.

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Robots are simulated as spring-mass trusses evolved by a genetic algorithm. Fitness is measured by horizontal displacement. The examples below show the best robot at three points during one run (eval 5708 → 7439 → 65713).

eval 5708	eval 7439	eval 65713

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Quick start

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make -j$(nproc)
cd ../prod
bash run.sh

Requires: C++17, CMake, Eigen3, Raylib, yaml-cpp, ffmpeg.

Documentation

Hosted at https://DanielMarchand.github.io/smeagol/ — rebuilt automatically on every push to main.

To build locally:

make docs          # from inside build/
# open docs/doxygen/html/index.html

Requires Doxygen (apt install doxygen).