4 Jun ’08
Main
12 May ’08
Task 1: associating food with foodsources
With the memory and the world in place, it is time to subject one craa to its first task: to learn in a field of objects that tree-objects and food-objects are associated (i.e., in their world food lies always adjacent to a tree, and poisonous plants always grow near rocks). The animal is not steering itself yet, but is forced in a random forward walk, and biting whatever it encounters.12 Feb ’08
The name of the beast
Decided on a name for my artificial animals. Up to now I was calling them boids (after Reynolds work on flocking birds), critters (after my original professors work), and half a dozen other names, which gets confusing after a while. From now on, a single one of them will be a cra, and multiple ones will be referred to as craas.Artificial life has been given many different names before, and I will try to maintain a species-name list here of artificial lifeforms.
23 Jan ’08
Memory
Memory of the critters will be a fairly simple thing to start with. The short term memory can be imagined as a simple tube, in which the experiences of the animal are entered on one side, and slowly shoved through the tube as more new experiences are added. Experiences come in three forms: observations, actions (your own), effects (for example, a change in your energy state).20 Jan ’08
.Plan
Let's build something intelligent.The goal is to create a rich virtual world in which some artificial life critters live. The critters are designed to be as close to a tabula rasa as I can manage to make them: the main difference between critters will be inherited physical characteristics (size, speed, quality of sight, smell or hearing) and their inherited preferential responses (attack, eat, move away, move towards, hide), which develops over time (ie, youngsters might prefer to hide, whereas adults might move away).
Sidetrack
16 May ’08
Wandering Algorithms
In a previous weblog, I had started to work on different algorithms by which craas could steer themselves through empty space. Spending time on this now seems something like a folly to me, as the algorithm I use now lets the animal steer themselves based on previous experiences. There is still some use in the older algorithms, for example if a certain group of animals isn't your focus of interest, and you just want to have them move around in your artificial world. I'll describe the different algorithms I used here, and refer to some of the literature.Part of them are in ruby / OpenGL (the previous language / graphics engine I used), and part of them are described in words.