Life as it could be - Virtual Creatures

This video is the result of a work to the class of Evolutionary Computation in University of Coimbra.
The work was based on the work of Karl Sims, with these differences:

- Were included spheres;
- Were applied different fitness functions (mainly bridge and ball stages);
- We used NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) to evolve their little brains;

For the simulation we used Breve (www.spiderland.org).

Special thanks to:
Cesar Gomes for the help given to link his python implementation of NEAT (http://code.google.com/p/neat-python) to Breve.
Penousal Machado for the initial steps.

If you what to know more contact us at:
http://student.dei.uc.pt/~racosta

Authors:
Guilherme Rodrigues
Nuno Correia
Pedro Oliveira
Ricardo Quintas
Rui Costa

Music: http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/harvard/harvard.swf


"The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own."
Daniel Dennett, NY Times 2005

Category:

Education

Tags:

• virtual
• creatures
• evolution
• genetic
• algorithms
• karl
• sims
• alife
• artificial
• life
• ai
• intelligence
• morphology
• neat
• neuroevo

[p8prclip]

Man I wish I could live 140 billion years to see the box give birth to some other boxes!

[cpdomina]

This project was implemented in Breve (search google for "breve Simulation Environment"). The package contains a module called BreveCreatures that you can download and test. However, the creatures seen in this video where evolved with a distinct (and more complex) approach than the one implemented by default in Breve...

[SaucyYum]

0:30oh that ones a knee slapper!

[ashinms]

@Houshalter It's a dick slappin good time!

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

@MrChristianWright 3DVCE?

IT works well, is diverse, and as for "fun"... well these things don't run as fast as you might think... it's more like something you leave running on your computer while you sleep XD

[LIKUS007]

Great job, thanks for sharing it!

Saludos desde México!

[MrChristianWright]

Does ANYONE Know of a FREE , EASY . AND FUN evolution simulator!!!!????

[Houshalter]

0:30 fail!

[Nouseeker]

every time i see stuff like this or a machine trying to pass the turing test i get a certain feeling of dread, the vague sense that im staring at something alien on the verge of growing beyond our input... anyway, lets just hope the singularity is friendly and sane ;D

[twholland1]

This program is awesome, it's crazy cool to watch the different features the shapes develop to become fitter.

[nicoli669]

this Simulation is more for research not a game if you want something thats like this just play a game called Spore it's the same but "funner"

[virtualspecies]

Cool, Sims-ish project :-)

And I like the presentation style!