First things first. I decided this week to "reboot the world" on the Intelligent Design version of Darwin at Home so that we can once again start from scratch and see new kinds of bodies emerge. If anybody is interested in data-mining, I have a huge archive file with all the XML representation of the different creatures everywhere as they've evolved through the last months. I can imagine that this might be interesting to academics. Let me know if you want it.

Then on to the recent developments. I found myself dividing the tensegrity program into two parts: one of them is a "laboratory" where we have lots of interesting controls to play with, and the other is a "world" where growth and sprouting is starting to happen autonomously and you can travel around a huge space, creating them and watching them grow. It's all in the beginning stages, but both versions have been wrapped into one and put online for you to play with.

Listen to the podcast to hear about tensegrity vulcanization, whereby extra cables are added to stiffen things up.

http://www.darwinathome.org/tensegrity-20080312/

I've been working on this for quite a while, nowadays spending the odd day at the architects' office, and I'm afraid it's difficult for me to leave it alone during evenings and weekends as well. It's so much fun to play around with these tensegrity things and to puzzle out how they actually work. Also, it's good to get the navigation working nicely. What's really encouraging as well is how the architects react when I show them what's developing, because they're very enthusiastic.

Most of the efforts in the last while have been to make sure that it's possible for these tensegrities to kind of grow on their own. To make this happen, I've created classes called Module and Triangle (links below) to represent segments of the tensegrities and the places where new ones can sprout, respectively. A module is capable of sniffing out what triangles it currently has.

To set up something for starters so that tensegrities can grow spontaneously in the "world" version, I've set up a new Life package with mostly Java interfaces that give a carefully limited view of the things that can be manipulated. For example, the "Segment" is implemented by the Module.java below. I'll talk more about these things as they start to take a more concrete form.

By the way, this podcast and the last were recorded using a very tiny and effective device, the iAudio U3. I love the convenience of just using such a little device with no moving parts, and I like the quality enough to keep using it for this.

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