NORNBRAIN: A project aiming to help norns think harder about their problems
I am working on a project, heavily a WIP.
A post by u/bigpredditguy inspired me to take it to GitHub and see if I can find other interested people with neural-network, programming, or coding skills and experience to join in.
I am in the process of building a new CfC-based brain architecture intended to mimic/replicate the original game's mechanics and be neurobiologically informed and rooted, with the aim of eventually creating a system that allows Norns in-game to learn and make decisions more effectively.
I am a human biology/neuroscience graduate and occupational therapist by trade with a career mostly in mental health. I am not a coder, and Claude Code has been a big teacher on the journey so far.
The brain, as it currently stands, is not sufficiently functional to fully replicate normal SV-brain behaviour. I believe it has the bones to do so one day.
This project began as a passion project, stemming from my having started playing Creatures 1 when I was 9, which sparked a lifelong interest in artificial life, neuroscience, and neural networks. With the advent of Claude Code, an avenue to learn the coding and maths components of the project idea opened up, and I grabbed it with two hands.
I know the limits of my knowledge and capacity. By publicising the project, smarter and more knowledgeable people than me may see something worth building on, and together we might get this to a state where it actually works.
Please feel free to take a look at https://github.com/thechimpmatrix/nornbrain
There’s a good level of detail about the SV Rule OG creature brain at https://github.com/thechimpmatrix/nornbrain/blob/main/docs/reference/svrule-brain-complete-reference.md
You can see my progress to date in there. A lot of research and synthesis has happened since I started a couple of months ago, and it is a bit chaotic right now, with some ideas at different stages of maturity. Feel free to poke around and see if anything interests you enough to join a team for it.