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Copypasta from an ongoing conversation about my brain model.

Steve Grand · 2025-07-29T21:27:13Z

@Mabus suggested we move this from the blog comments (where things easily get lost) to the forum. So here's the main part of the conversation. Feel free to weigh in below! @FoggyGoofball: Speaking of brain code, I think that i’m going to diagram all of the lobes and layers onto graph paper. Being able to see the laid out physically will be a huge help to me. I’m going to try not to bother you endlessly about this stuff, but i have two questions in that regard. First, do you think that with adequate application of the “sucker” function on each of the feet that we could create a creature capable of climbing walls? Is it actually providing downforce, or is it an attraction to the surface underfoot? As I understand it from looking at gloop genomes, we might be able to introduce a new IO brain organ that could translate a separate set of gait genes for climbing when we sense verticality in the spine andor feet. Obviously it’s not simple, but would it be possible? And last question for today is what do the visual properties kind, earth, air, fire, and water represent specifically? I can also confirm that the fallback to previous d3d versions did work successfully in the pre alpha build that mabus shared with me. @Steve: Wow! You’re really getting into it!!! I do have a diagram of all the (main) brain maps and how they’re connected to each other. Do you want it or would you rather figure it out for yourself? The suckers exert a down force. I guess they could be made to exert that force in any direction, although to climb walls the creature’s weight would exert a large force at right angles to it and I’m not sure what the effects would be (on their leg joints especially). Making a complete physics-based creature was a huge challenge (all the other attempts I’ve seen cheat far more than they admit to). As Unity and PhysX have improved over the years, it’s got less and less of a nightmare, but it’s still very weird and unpredictable, so the creatures needed a bit of help sticking to the floor! Anyway, I think climbing would be possible in principle. Swimming and flying would come further up my own list, but either way, adding an extra dimension makes the whole thing a lot more complex and resource-hungry. Just keeping them from falling over is a big enough task – every time Unity changes their physics code it all goes wrong again! KIND is the basic type of object: { “outdoors”, “indoors”, “vehicle”, “furniture”, “device”, “utensil”, “plant”, “animal”, “person” } (where “person” means another phantasian or the player). After that it’s a hierarchy. So, if KIND==outdoors, then EARTH == { “wild”, “natural”, “cultivated”, “builtup”, “industrial” }, and so on. But these labels are purely for my own use. All the creatures see is a list of numbers from -1 to +1. They don’t know that -1 means “outdoors”. Mostly I just need to ensure that I give objects a unique pattern of these numbers, and choosing them sequentially would solve that. But obviously if all the plants have the same number for KIND and meaningful numbers for shape, color and habit, then it’s easier for the creatures to learn to recognize a few plants and then develop beliefs about whether an unfamiliar plant-like thing might be edible or poisonous. I chose EARTH, AIR, FIRE, WATER, because that give me some vague logic I could use, based on the ancient ideas of the Elements. So the spikiness of a plant might equate to it having a lot of FIRE in it, whereas for “indoor” kinds, that might represent how well insulated or heated they are. It helps to make the world slightly more predictable for the creatures (but not so predictable that they have nothing to think about). But really it’s just the IO maps that still retain this earth, air, fire, water naming convention. Elsewhere I took to thinking of the KIND as a noun and the other descriptive lists as different levels of adjective. There are verbs and adverbs, too. One day I hope to have the luxury of some time to think this through much better. My son did his neuroscience PhD partly on the distinction between functional categorization and perceptual categorization. Right now I just have a kind of compromise, where objects are perceptually categorized, yet there’s also a vague functional logic built into it, so that learning can be generalized from experience of similar objects. But it’s yet another big challenge, so for now, every object in the world can be recognized as a pattern of five numbers, and creatures can attempt to divine some kind of structure in these patterns as they learn to recognize things. The whole subject of combining self-organizing maps, with functional v perceptual categorization, with the need for one-shot learning (IRL, nobody needs to see a million cats before they can recognize another cat, unlike today’s so-called AI) is something that has occupied a lot of my thinking over the years, but I don’t have good answers yet. Or at least, I haven’t had time to try them out… @FoggyGoofball: I’d ...

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FoggyGoofball

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15/01/2026 2:58 pm

Have you read growing up with Lucy? @Steve tried to approach construction through a lens of biomimicry, systems of Springs in place of tendons and whatnot.

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Midnight

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16/01/2026 11:15 pm

I’ve been reading through it. As I read, I can’t help but think about the various materials and electronics that are available now, that weren’t back then, and what I might do differently if I were to attempt to build something like Lucy in the present day. The availability of chips with greater processing power is obvious, but there’s also been significant advances in flexible materials and sensors. And greater processing power would also allow for binocular vision, for instance.

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Copypasta from an ongoing conversation about my brain model.

Brain Map Wiring

General

Glossary of genetics terms

Editing this encyclopedia

Change log

The Simbiosis simulator

Building user mods

Physicality

Plant life

Frampton Gurney

Neuroscience

Biochemistry

Virtuality

Biology

Reproduction

Sexes and sex chromosomes

Dominant versus recessive genes

In-game help

Genetics

Encyclopedia Phantasia