In the last article, we created a trivial genome. We’ll now extend this with a far more expressive DNA. We’ll increase the number of valid codons but retain a simple approach to evaluating them. We’ll focus on features of the world with which our organisms can interact. The features will be ideas like food and threats. They should require our genomes to have longer sequences to cope with the complexity. Hopefully, there will no longer be an obvious solution.

A hobby of mine is Artificial Life. I grew up in what I’d call the Golden Age of AL. Tamagotchi, SimAnt, and Creatures were all released during my formative years. In 2001 Black & White was released. Since then it feels like AL has been reserved to the realm of academia. I had hoped in the 22 years since Creatures 3 we’d have a better selection of AL games and experiments, but it remains a niche area of interest.

This site was previously running on a Scaleway dev instance. Unfortunately I lost the keys to login to that machine. Well, not lost, but temporarily misplaced due to COVID-19. Never to miss an opportunity, I decided to migrate from that dev instance to one managed by Scaleway’s Kubernetes service. What I thought would be a 30 minute job ended up taking a lot longer. I ran into issues with cert-manager, it wasn’t able to “self-test” its own certificate challenges.

When working with Helm you may find yourself using helm dependency build. This will resolve chart dependencies from scratch. It places the resulting packages in charts/ and generates a lockfile to boot. I’ve noticed it can be particularly slow, and so went about some sleuthing. Test setup I’m using helm 3 (3.4.2) at the moment, however this behaviour has been around for some time. I’m using a fresh install of helm with no extra repositories defined (this is important).