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Show HN: Demo of Agent Based Model on GPU with CUDA and OpenGL (Windows/Linux)

by ktt8788 on 12/4/23, 7:34 PM with 21 comments

• by macawfish on 12/4/23, 9:15 PM

  What exactly is an "agent based model" in this case? What I see is a lot of triangles moving around, but what exactly drives them?

• by jasonjmcghee on 12/5/23, 12:00 AM

  You should work on inter-agent interaction next! It's so much fun.

  I have played with this a fair amount and put a couple of my experiments in a repo- both slime mold simulation and "particle life".

  Here's the repo: https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders

  And a video of the slime mold: https://twitter.com/_jason_today/status/1663378736098738177?...

• by TheHideout on 12/4/23, 10:53 PM

  Are the agents independent or are they affected by neighbors? It would be nice to see some classic ABM examples like wolf-sheep population, flocking, and wildfire spread to demonstrate the utility of this.

• by TheEzEzz on 12/4/23, 11:48 PM

  Super cool, curious to see where you take this! I did some work on GPGPU for agent simulations for an RTS years ago ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4fKJIrv0J8 ). Doing things like pathfinding on the GPU gets tricky, especially taking into account how agents affect paths of other agents. Happy to jam anytime if you're brainstorming applications.

• by moritonal on 12/5/23, 1:40 AM

  If you want to create some pretty effects, add the concept of a velocity-texture which is added to agents velocity as they pass over it. Then let the user draw on the texture. Very cheap way to get interactivity. My own version from before compute shades were a thing (https://moritonal.github.io/force-particles/)

• by posnet on 12/5/23, 12:57 AM

  Another fun one, not sure about accuracy, but the visuals are stunning.

  https://youtu.be/dSkxvi9igqQ

  https://github.com/chrxh/alien/

• by m-murphy on 12/4/23, 11:33 PM

  Are the entities interacting in any way here? That's pretty critical for agent based models as they enable complicated/unexpected emergent behavior from simplified rules due to the interactions of the entities.

• by m-murphy on 12/4/23, 11:34 PM

  Another related project for ABMs utilizing GPUs: https://docs.flamegpu.com/guide/index.html

• by sgt101 on 12/4/23, 9:57 PM

  reminds me of the flocking demos 20 years ago...

• by westurner on 12/5/23, 5:52 AM

  Could this work in WebGL and/or WebGPU (and/or WebNN) with or without WASM in a browser?

  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48228192/webgl-compute-s...

  https://github.com/conda-forge/glfw-feedstock/blob/main/reci...

  pyglfw: https://github.com/conda-forge/pyglfw-feedstock/blob/main/re...

  - [ ] glfw recipe for emscripten-forge: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...

  Emscripten porting docs > OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 *, glfw: https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/multimedia_and_graphics/...

  WebGPI API > GPUBuffer: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API

  gpuweb/gpuweb: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38355444 :

  > It actually looks like pygame-web (pygbag) supports panda3d and harfang in WASM

  Harfang and panda3d do 3D with WebGL, but FWIU not yet agents in SSBO/VBO/GPUBuffer.

  SSBO: Shader Storage Buffer Object: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Shader_Storage_Buffer_Ob...

  /? WebGPU compute: https://www.google.com/search?q=webgpu+compute

  "WebGPU Compute Shader Basics" https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-compute...