Cromulant

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What is this?

This is a kind of toy you can use for your amusement.

It requires minimal interaction, most things happen automatically.

You might want to keep it running in some tiled layout.

Usage

You start with a set of 25 to 250 random ants (100 by default).

You can specify this anytime through Restart. When you restart everything resets to zero like triumphs and hits.

There are 1000 names available. This is used as the pool of names to select randomly.

Every x minutes or seconds a new update from a random ant appears.

The content of the update depends on a random number.

It can be a triumph, a hit, travel, thought, sentence.

The ant with the highest score is shown in the footer.

Ants get merged and replaced over time.

All of this happens automatically, though you can manually force actions by using the mouse on the portraits or main menu. Try click and middle click.

Read Algorithm for more information about the mechanics.

Installation

First make sure you have qt installed in your system.

In arch you can do this with: sudo pacman -S qt6-base

In ubuntu/debian you can do this with: sudo apt install qt6-base-dev

Quick Installation

If you have pipx and linux installed you can use the following command:

pipx install git+https://github.com/madprops/cromulant --force

Advanced Installation

1. Clone this repo.

2. python -m venv venv

3. venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Use run.sh or venv/bin/python -m cromulant.main

5. (Optional) Manually create desktop entries and icons for the application.

Limitations

Since it's python you will need to remake the virtual env if you rename/move the directory. And the environment might simply not work after python upgrades, requiring you to remake the virtual env or re-install through pipx.

Algorithm

A random ant is picked based on weights (oldest update date weighs more). More weight means something is more likely to get picked. Then a random number between 0 and length-of-methods-1 is picked. For each number an action happens to produce an update.

Words (sentences) have more weight compared to the rest of the update methods. Some methods roll another number to pick the outcome like in the case of think where there are 3 think types, these can also have custom weights.

The top score is calculated on every new update. The score is calculated as (Triumph - Hits). If multiple ants have the same score, the oldest one wins. The ant with the top score is shown in the footer. The top ant uses a special portrait on updates.

For merge, the words of each name are used. They get filled with random words if less than 2 words. One word from each set is picked randomly. The triumph and hits get combined. The original ants get terminated and the merged one hatches. An extra random ant is hatched to fill the gap.

Storage

The state of ants is stored in ~/.local/share/cromulant/ants.json

The settings file is stored in ~/.config/cromulant/settings.json

Or the equivalents in non-linux systems.

There is a command line argument to define a custom location for the ants state file. This means you can have multiple states to save/load.

There is a command line argument to define a custom location for the names list. This means you can use this with another set of names. If not enough names are provided the remaining ants are created with random words.

The Name

I read the word cromulent being used somewhere which turned out to be invented by The Simpsons.

I created a new programming project to practice/study and tried to use that word for the name but made a typo.

I liked the typo and made a game around it.

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Command line arguments

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