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Mutating Animations

Posted by michael on from the learning-to-fly-but-i-ain't-got-wings dept.

Weird_one writes "Discover magazine's current issue has an intriguing article involving using genetic algorithims to evolve an animation of a walking individual."

2 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Its more difficult than one thinks... by arvindn · · Score: 5, Informative
    In simple textbook situations illustrating the genetic algorithm, we simply represent the solution space as a string of bits, and cut it at some point and recombine them to form offspring. However, real world applications are a lot more complex. That's because an arbitrary cut-n-paste of solution strings is likely to result, with extremely high probability, in an invalid string. This is the problem of having a sparse solution space. In this particular example, suppose you represent the figure as a sequence of pixels and try to apply a genetic algorithm on that representation. You'll never get anywhere, because most sequence of pixels are meaningless.

    What needs to be done to make the GA work is to develop a solution space representatin in which each parameter can be varied independently of the others. In this case:

    The character's body plan involved 700 distinct parameters that needed to be optimized to teach it how to walk like a human. .

    So its not like the computer learnt to walk by itself. There's a lot of hard work involved before you can even start the GA. Congrats to Reil.

    <shameless plug> On a slightly related note, I'm about to start implementing a GA to develop a killer AI for gtkboard . If you are interested in coding a GA, you are welcome to join :) (Of course it won't be anywhere as complex as the one in the article, but still lots of fun.)

  2. Video Clips from Natural Motion by gopher_hunt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Heres the link to what they were talking about in the article. Walker Evolution

    This next one shows off a lot more of what they can do. Mainly they abuse their models.
    Natural Motion Show Real (14.5M Divx)
    I love the tennis ball in the crotch clip. Insert bob saget joke here.