Slime Battler
Simulated slime moulds play Pokémon battles. One is steered by a neural network that can only feed it; the other was evolved and plays on its own senses. Either way, whichever option the slime gathers on is what happens.
Loading the battles…
- Slime
- Food: how much the network wants that option
- The slime's choice
How well it plays
Win rate over games against three opponents.
How it works
The options. Each turn there are up to ten choices: switch to one of six team members, or use one of four moves. Each is a food site on a ring around a slime of about 460 simulated agents.
The network. A small neural network reads the battle (move power and type matchups, both sides' health, the team) and sets how much food each legal option gets. It never chooses directly.
The slime. The slime then runs for 100 steps. Its agents follow Jones's model of Physarum polycephalum, drifting towards food. The legal option with the most slime around it is played. The slime is not reset between turns, so where it sat last turn pulls on this one. The network has to learn to steer something with momentum.
Training. The network learned by playing on a local Showdown server with PPO, its choices always passing through the slime. An identical network trained without the slime shows what the slime costs.
The evolved slime. A second slime has no network at all. Fixed senses turn the battle into food (expected damage at the move sites, type matchup and health at the switch sites), and evolution tuned everything else: its physiology, how much each sense counts, and whether to build walls between its core and the options. Over 25 generations it learned to attack, never to switch by choice, and to do without walls.
Notes
The format is random battles (generation 9 singles): both sides get random teams, so there's no team building. The network never terastallizes. All games were played on a private local copy of Pokémon Showdown, never on the public server.
The slime you see is regrown in your browser from each battle's seed and the network's recorded feeding, so it's the same slime that made the decisions.
Pokémon and all related names are trademarks of Nintendo, Creatures Inc. and GAME FREAK inc. This is an independent research project, not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Battles were simulated with Pokémon Showdown (MIT licence).