Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Life Makes Evolving Art
brilanon writes "Good news! On Sept 4, critterdrug, the a-life lab for the twenty-teens, was updated to make generating a species almost trivial. A new video shows semi-random artificial animals gaining neurons and synapses as they compete to draw a gradient on an animated shared canvas which constitutes 1024 frames spread through time. The canvas is a 10-megabyte digital background for the lossy neural nets that populate the world. What you get are cellular automata run by psychic neural nets that are bound by the rules of a survival contest with physics. Features implementations of telepathy, Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields and five types of drugs. The key assignments have changed since critterding; check the changelog on the web page for the new ones. Happy hacking!"
The summary probably makes more sense when you're high.
which is totally what she said
It's critterdrug.
Yes, but what is is?
It's a fork of critterding.
Yes, but what is it?
It's an a-life lab for the twenty-teens.
Yes, but what is it?
It's semi-random artificial animals gaining neurons and synapses as they compete to draw a gradient on an animated shared canvas which constitutes 1024 frames spread through time.
Yes, but what is it?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
I'm pretty goddamn drunk right now but I'm fucking certain that summary makes as little sense to everyone else on here as it does to me.
my universe keeps getting stopped and restarted.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Translation: ... pokemon? eating brains and trying to use the gradient fill tool in photoshop on a 1024 frame video. The canvas is a big background for .. digimon I guess. What you get are viruses bound by the psychic friends network on the Survivor tv show competing against ... the forces of physics? Maybe they're trying to defy gravity or build a space elevator or something. The submitter took 5 kinds of drugs! Keys, or maybe people, have been moved about in a re-org. Love my product!
Advertisement! Something for teens has been updated with a new interface, making it easier! There's a video of
Hire a better PR person, seriously.
... is in the eye of the beholder. Don't make them smarter or more advanced or with knowledge of what is beauty. A rainbow could be considered art, and that is just light passing thru a prism.
Did somebody make a talking snake and the apple yet. What about a "tree of knowledge" ?
This is a good example as to why smart people need a marketing person.
WTF is it? I get that it's suppose to be AI, but what the heck is it trying to accomplish? Is it trying to make a color palette?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
but is it art?! o_O
+ keys to drug the whole population: hjnm, and undrug, dfcvb. Fullscreen was moved to g, colourmode moved to x, and mouselook moved to / (careful!)
If you hit F1, a lot of those keys are misreported -- I'm so sorry ;_;
Also, do hit 's' as one of the first things and edit your new profile called 'default' in the working directory, then launch with --profile default to use the new settings. A lot of the options new with critterdrug aren't configurable in-game yet...
Also it uses ~/.critterding like critterding itself. This is not really a major collision, you can still use both apps if you separate the profile names and keep the load dir clean (can't exchange critters between ding and drug)
Those are the most important caveats... if you want to show them pictures, I'd make ~/.critterding/screenshots a ramdisk... then just squirt 64x48 PNM's to scrn.pnm there, and set show_scrn.pnm_every. Also, anim_screen_every can be set much higher than 1 in order to make sure each pixel sits long enough to convert to a firing rate (not just a potential change)... or they might only 'see' a blur
I reasoned eventually that what they experience as qualia is probably firing rates not potentials. But what exactly does that say, anyway?
I'm really happy it hit the frontpage :3 It's a science app and it isn't finished but I hope someone gets some joy from this. Researching evolved AI has been a lot of fun for me. The app is about ten months old... critterding, two to three years. In fact critterding is included in debian now.
Wow
The Electric Sheep.
Best. Screensaver. Ever.
it makes sense to me! oh wait.. what?
It's not too slow right now. Let me give you a species and a profile to use
http://ansistego.sf.net/6600-generation-foodotropes-for-critterdrug.tgz critters
http://ansistego.sf.net/foodotrope-drug.profile
Heck I'll just link em on the page
I've been playing around with virtual life and neural networks. .. something.
As far as i understand its one a the few Macintosh based virtual
It is "some" world, with "some" rules on it with apperantly a lot of "neurons" who are not able to make any sense to my own neurons.
I guess their world is to bizar to be real as i understand; a physics engine and rain of drug ??? or food ?? ..
On which some "blocks" evolve,...( but they stay a block??)
I such world i'm realy not surprised about the numbers of genes or neurons, or group behaviour as long as it doesnt make sense
I think i should keep in mind how typical Mac Ipod Ipad I.. etc users think;
"well its not microsoft based its cool because its Mac i got fooled by their marketing and so i must have one"
This programmer doesnt care either about functionality or reality .. aslong as it does look cool its ok for iMac users.
Words as cool are much more important then practical, or usefull or insightfull
For people starting with in interest in AI and virtual live, without a need to be " iWhite-thisCool " disease i would recommend Darwin bots; its freeware
Something like darwinbots is more fun to watch, new users might need some background reading first : http://bio.freelogy.org/wiki/Darwinbots
You can make a sim with plants and predators, based on simple DNA.. not with neurons (but life doesnt require neurons...bacteria dont have them neither)
And then observe your world.. Darwinbots 2 is old sure, but you can see what actualy happens.
And your written DNA might even mutate, or over the internet you can do a battle between species.
It will cost you some time to understand DNA but then its pretty funny to play with.
there is even more AI and virtual life on the windows platform, if you use google, and darwinbots isnt the best maybe.. but its free not like many other software in this field.
It's April Fools' already?
Makes as much sense as the rest of this article did. I want an ootball jersey.
This video shows off a successful evolution of creatures with critterdrug:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJCce8u9LAo&feature=related
You can see the creatures walking around on the platform consuming food and avoiding bumping into each other. They look almost like snails. They were evolved over time after many iterations of the program ran, looping over and over letting creatures die until one survived to reproduce successfully and survive on it's own. And, so a species was born.
IMHO this video is far more impressive and a better explanation of what the program does than the one provided in the article.
From what I gather, the joints and brains come together at random. And, if their motor skills are lacking they die of starvation. If their brains aren't intelligent enough to process their inputs and generate the series of steps necessary to gather food and procreate, they die off. However, eventually after enough generations you encounter a species of critter that combines good joint "design" and decent enough intelligence to move around successfully, gather and eat food, find a mate, and procreate.
That's what you're seeing the result of in the video above.