Sun, 2 Mar 2008

Tensegrity Foliage

Posted by fluxe at 9:25 PM in (Un-)Intelligent Design

 

We took a little break in the form of a trip to Berlin last week, but when I arrived on friday I thought it might be fun to set the alarm and take part in the Biota Live Podcast from the place we rented, since there was WiFi.

As usual it was a great discussion and it got me thinking a lot more about making something you might call artificial life. In this podcast episode I try and describe the vision of tensegrities as plants, primarily busy with seeding themselves.

This should all be possible to do, and I'm not sure that I can resist trying now that the image is lodged in my mind.

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Wed, 21 Jun 2006

What's it about?

Posted by fluxe at 9:17 PM in (Un-)Intelligent Design

 

"So in this statement we say you cannot teach this to children, it is wrong."

This is the issue that makes me want darwin@home seen by as many people as possible.

Fri, 16 Jun 2006

A Broader Reach

Posted by fluxe at 10:10 PM in (Un-)Intelligent Design

 

A question comes up quite consistently when I discuss Darwin@Home in the scientific community, and it centers around the extra effort I'm putting in to make the software available and really accessible to everybody out there on the internet. Scientists tend to rarely give user interface issues much attention because they're more concerned about publishing their results.

Publish or perish is fortunately not a description of my predicament. Since Darwin@Home is all about having lots of people help along from their home PCs by evolving things, much of my attention goes to user interface. It's not available yet, but my new version is all about having people make choices which guide the evolution. I'd love to see lots of participation, and hopefully it will spark the interest of some ambitious kid (or grad student) who wants to build something on the basis of my work.

The really unfortunate thing is the amount of really interesting projects that academics are doing all over the world but that never see the light of day outside a really small community of their own kind. Lots of things could be polished up and released to interest people who might be inspired.

I guess I prefer that a lot of people have a chance at a little inspiration on the issue of evolution, above having a small group of experts read many pages of analysis.

Wed, 14 Jun 2006

DECOI 2006

Posted by fluxe at 2:25 PM in (Un-)Intelligent Design

 

I've been asked by Martijn Schut to give a lecture about Darwin@Home at the DECOI summer school about collective intelligence and evolution that he's putting on at the Free University of Amsterdam

That's very cool, of course, were it not for the fact that we will be on vacation this summer to Canada, so I won't be able to attend. When he proposed that I lecture, I already knew we would be gone, so I immediately suggested that I instead make a movie, interspersing me talking about a bunch of things and rendered fluidiom movies. He went for it, so now I have to make that film in the next couple of weeks and then edit it on my powerbook in Toronto this summer.

My friend Hans Groenendijk has consented to add his creative ideas and camera skills to the effort, and last night we got together to try out some shots and work out some elements. It looks like it will be fun.

So on the one hand it's very unfortunate that the DECOI summer school conflicted with my vacation, but on the other hand, the students there will get a movie about Darwin@Home, and the movie will of course be made available afterwards on this site. In a way it's more useful to have a movie than to give a single lecture. I hope it turns out well.

Mon, 29 May 2006

Growth!

Posted by fluxe at 11:21 PM in (Un-)Intelligent Design

 

I'm playing around with the software with four simultaneous creatures and the feeling reminds me of when I first saw the creatures run a few years ago. I was dumbfounded, and I am again right now.

I set it up so that it refines motor coordination until there are four creatures which bound almost equally proficiently, and then a kind of earthquake happens and they all grow new tetrahedrons somewhere fairly low on their bodies. They then have to fairly compete with their new attributes until they once again refine to being almost equally proficient runners.

The shock is that you see them grow limbs to accomplish their task!

Wed, 24 May 2006

Why the Un?

Posted by fluxe at 9:13 PM in (Un-)Intelligent Design

 

I hope that I can claim that the Fluidiom software was designed in a relatively intelligent manner, but that's not the reason for the use of this phrase here. It's all about how Fluidiom works, by making a hybrid fitness function: part human, part algorithm. Of course I've also been Touched by His Noodly Appendage.

The version I'm working on starts up by flying you towards a geodesic sphere with many hundreds of hexagonal tiles and twelve pentagonal ones. This is what you might call Planet Fluidiom, and if you do nothing it rotates. At each tile, or "place" lives a fluidiom creature, and when you click your mouse on the planet, the four nearest places rise up, displaying their bodies as you descend to approach them.

Those four bodies then appear in four separate quarters of the screen and they are running (or hopefully struggling to learn how). When one runs quite a bit further than another (not sure how to tune that yet) it is a winner, and may claim the loser's place to introduce a mutation of itself. This takes place without your intervention and you can watch the running behavior gradually improve. That's the Un!

The intelligent part comes when you click your mouse on one of the four, because you have then spoken your judgement and caused your favorite body to claim all three other places for its "offspring". You can click to your heart's content, and keep choosing until you get the shapes and behaviors you like, and then sit back and let the algorithm take over to refine the muscle coordination.

If collaborating with an algorithm is against your religious ethics for some reason, be advised to avoid exposing yourself to this experiment.