Thu, 17 Jul 2008

The Blind Watchmaker

Posted by fluxe at 11:36 PM in Code

 

In this episode of the podcast I once again go for a walk in the bush, and this time talk about the change in direction that the Nuance Engine has taken, as well as about the very first Greythumb Netherlands get-together.

Here's a picture of WORM, where Greythumb NL was held in June:

..and here is the duck (a WORM-sponsored work of art, for you cultural barbarians!)

I've decided to change the name of the project to Blind Watchmaker because I no longer like the association "engine", and it's one of the most thought-provoking archetype memes that Dawkins introduced with his book of that name.

I'll save going into the actual Blind Watchmaker code until I've got it stable enough. It's going to be a neat system, which lets you submit instruction sets and takes it from there.

ecodesic

This is the first crack at creating a mini-universe in which the Blind Watchmaker system will be demonstrated. The little balls you see represent creatures that move around on the surface of the planet. Listen to the podcast to hear about how I plan to try and turn this into a Blind Watchmaker programming competition.

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Sat, 5 Jul 2008

POV-Ray Images are Back

Posted by fluxe at 12:18 PM in /

 

There's something about a ray-traced image that is so beautiful! Things can be shiny, in which case all the reflections are taken care of perfectly by the ray-trace algorithm. I put some time in yesterday to get code up and running that generates POV-Ray scripts based on the tensegrity object model, and here is the result:


Click here to see the full-scale image.

It kind of reminds me of some of the paintings of Salvadore Dali with the vast empty spaces and the precise shadows.

Soon this same piece of code will be employed to make movies of the growing tensegrities. I suspect that the vast majority of visitors to darwin@home are not the kind of people who would be interested in running a program to see stuff, so it always makes me happy to be able to produce accessible images and films of these things.