Rust Scriptbots

Rust ScriptBots

ScriptBots is a modern Rust reimagining of Andrej Karpathy’s classic agent-based evolution simulator. Our goal is a faithful, deterministic port with a GPU-accelerated UI, pluggable brain implementations, and first-class analytics. This is a multi-crate Cargo workspace separating simulation core, renderer-neutral runtime protocol, brains, storage, rendering, and the application shell.

The authoritative roadmap is `PLAN_TO_REARCHITECT_AND_REVIVE_RUST_SCRIPTBOTS.md`. The older GPUI port plan is retained as historical design evidence, and a sibling WebAssembly plan lives in `PLAN_TO_CREATE_SIBLING_APP_CRATE_TARGETING_WASM.md`.

Philosophy & purpose

• Why this exists: ScriptBots is a minimalist artificial life laboratory. By rebuilding the original simulator with rigorously deterministic Rust systems, we can observe, measure, and reproduce emergent behavior at scale—without undefined behavior or global state muddying results.
• What we learn: How simple sensory channels and local rules produce complex population dynamics—cooperation vs. predation, resource gradients shaping migration, lineage divergence under different mutation schedules, and the role of perception in survival.
• LLM-in-the-loop science: The REST API, CLI, and MCP HTTP server expose the full control surface (knobs, patches, snapshots). This lets an external LLM agent act as an autonomous lab assistant: steering experiments, sweeping parameter spaces, logging observations into FrankenSQLite, and drafting human-readable reports.
  • Example workflows:
    • Parameter sweeps: vary mutation.{primary,secondary} and temperature gradients; record birth/death ratios and equilibrium populations.
    • Interventions: toggle closed worlds, inject carnivore cohorts, or freeze food diffusion to test resilience.
    • Reporting: query or export FrankenSQLite tables to generate charts and tables describing discovered phenomena (e.g., altruistic giving thresholds that stabilize