Tonight is a get-together of the Greythumb artificial life group in London, and Justin Lyon and I are trying to set up so that I am able to appear via Skype Video or iChat screen sharing to demonstrate the stuff I'm working on these days.

What I woud like to show people is the Tensegrity Laboratory that I've built in order to acquire enough intuition about how Tensegrity works so that I can create an appropriate growth algorithm. This is a link to the program that I hope to demonstrate remotely tonight:

http://www.darwinathome.org/tensegrity-20080325/

The processes so far involve:

  • "sprout" - building structures by sprouting modules
  • "vulcanize" - to make extra cable connections to solidify
  • "cling" - making new bar-cable connections to simplify tension network

It's interesting to think about this in the context of the ideas that have been floating around the Biota Podcast about evolving instruction sets for really open-ended evolution.

The main difference between that kind of thing and my work is that I'm focused on 3d space and how to evolve structures that can actually one day be built. The domain here is very specific, so the steps described above make up an "instruction set" for building tensegrities.