Alife

Most of the work I've done in alife centers around a Genetic Programming library I developed the summer of 1992. The GP library is a C++ implementation of John Koza's techniques described in his book, Genetic Programming. I was originally interested in evolving images using the same technique developed by Karl Sims. ( Check out "Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics in SIGGRAPH 91 proceedings). I wrote an image evolver that works really well on our SGI machines. From the two dimensional images I moved on to doing three dimensional shapes, eventually I used the same library to do behavioral experiements.

Evolution of Behaviors

Evolution of Behavior in a Simulated Environment is a CAVE application for VROOM exhibit at SIGGRAPH 94. This project uses genetic programming techniques to evolve avoidance and goal getting behaviors. Results are shown in the CAVE, E.V.L 's virtual reality theatre.
This project is similar to the one above except that the critters had four genetic programs guiding their behaviors. The evolver ran on an SP1 IBM machine at Argonne National Labs. Using communication software we hooked the the SP1 to the CAVE for viewing the creatures as they went about their buissness. The creatures were defined using a set of physical and behavior characteristics were defined by users using a Web page form.

Evolution of Images and Shapes

These images were created from an image evolver set to only produce black and white images.
I used the CAVE to select shapes for evolution. The techniques used are basically a three dimensional extention of two-d image evolution.