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One Man's Quest To Build True Artificial Life
Atriune writes "The creator of the renowned Creatures artificial life series is at it again. Fifteen years after the initial success of the Creatures Trilogy, Steve Grand continues his quest to go beyond simulation, and create real artificial life."
It's hard to tell if the approach is realistic, but it is certainly novel. Perhaps this will succeed in the areas the Lisp hackers of the '80s failed.
http://mashable.com/2011/03/03/artificial-life-steve-grand/?asid=92c52ad2
We're the place you cant even RTFA because we broke the hyperlinks.
Because we fired all of our proofreaders and editors.
correct link
http://mashable.com/2011/03/03/artificial-life-steve-grand/
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
http://mashable.com/2011/03/03/artificial-life-steve-grand/
Steve Grand is funding the development on kickstarter.
He's decided to ignore traditional publishers and do everything himself to make sure it comes out right. Probably a good idea too, Creatures isn't a very normal game, and having a publisher fund it would almost certainly mean they'd try to dumb it down.
I mean, I wouldn't want his experiment to escape and start eating silicon in order to survive and reproduce.
I am officially gone from
A beautiful language like Lisp is hardly one that you "hack" stuff together in. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find a missing parenthesis.
Like many amateurs, I have dabbled in artificial life. It will take every cpu cycle you can give it, for as long as you can, and still want more.
I evolved a retina. A very bad one. It was supposed to fill in a gap in an image (Think logo-removal for TV), but never worked well enough to be any use.
1) it's Known, not Knowed 2) it's Renowned, not Reknowed GRAMMAR HEIL
dare i say he's having...Grand delusions?
My sig has been answered.
I wish someone would make a Spiritual Successor to Creatures, I loved those games. I only played Creatures 2 and 3 but I like it so much I even setup a VM to play them. And no, the unofficial mod stuff for them is crap.
Somebody has already created DNA from scratch and placed it into a cell. So they are pretty close to doing this already. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html?_r=1/URL
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Q: What other artificial life/intelligence projects are you keeping tabs on? What should we be excited about? ...and then he goes on about not wanting to be "polluted" as an artist. While claiming this is not a game, but research.
A: Oh, I’m the wrong person to ask. I try not to look.
Research and science, that is uninterested in what is being done in the field... I have a hard time coming up with something that fits that bill except pseudo-science.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Sure, but is there a leader board hosted on the internet giving up to the minute stats on whose created creature has done the best job of killing it's competitors? No, I didn't think so!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'd like to check out Creatures just to see what he'd been working on.
Of course, Amazon is selling this (released in 1999 game) for $46.
Yeah, right. 12 year old software for $46?
-Styopa
Creatures 1 and 2 were awesome games for the 8-bit commodore and 32-bit Atari ST/Amiga. Check out the torture screens:
http://www.google.com/search?q=creatures%202%20commodore&tbs=vid:1
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Best part of the whole Creatures "scene" was a guy called Antinorn. He used to abuse, torture and otherwise mess up Norns so they were quivering wrecks addicted to pain and hunger. People used to get upset for this for some reason... others used to try and rehabilitate his creations as a challenge.
...Watson?
Watson: what am I?
There is an interesting short story by Greg Egan called "Crystal Nights" (no connection to the Nazi attack on the Jewish ghettos).
Partial SPOILER ALERT.
Basically someone (using a super-fast crystal based computer) tries to evolve, in software, lifeforms that will surpass humanity and solve our problems. What he doesn't realize is that evolution, to the individual (if not the species) means DEATH and the newly created godlings may not be happy with the sacrifices they have had to endure...
Anyway, Greg Egan (an extremely thought provoking author and, I think, physicist) has written some books that will blow your mind. Second only to the late Stanislaw Lem, he is one of my favorite S.F. writers. Go buy some of his books! Recommended: Permutation City (also about artificial life), Quaranitine and Incandescence. I think he may have released Crystal Nights as a free download.
It'd be awesome if there was a way to place this sort of intelligence into chemicals. Like, not just replicate the biology virtually... but actually do it with chemicals. Literally creating something like DNA, then getting bits of it copied with something like RNA to cause growth. Create cell like things that split. I mean, with work like this we have the theory... now could we put it into actual chemical practice? There I go being a dreamer :)
...in seeing any of them again, even in 2D.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
What other artificial life/intelligence projects are you keeping tabs on? What should we be excited about?
Oh, I'm the wrong person to ask. I try not to look. For one thing I don't want my own thoughts to be polluted by other people's, and for another there's always a hundred people who claim to be doing exactly what I'm doing and it's kind of depressing to know that.
I understand the desire to have unique ideas- actual research has found that people can generate more unique ideas alone than in a group (you can go find the CSCW papers for yourself, I'm lazy). That said, ignoring everything else isn't good either. There is a LOT of good work that has been done in this area. Is each individual project a complete solution to creating artificial life? No. But I suspect that many of the pieces are already out there just waiting to be assembled.
(which i doubt, but still)
Add Peer-to-Peer support and distributed computing support.
As in, SETI@Home, Folding@Home and the like.
Why not make Creatures@Home?
A virtual world on the internet with artificial life evolving on it.
It is something i have always dreamed of doing, but probably never will since i simply don't have the time or effort to get such a large project together and out the door. Not to mention barely any of the experience with the biology side of things.
It is all fine and well making AI for games, and having things exchange and inherit data, but that isn't enough.
Things it would need to be a successful experiment:
Everyone (node) is assigned a grid. It has an ID. (the grids could be any size)
Each node shares their grid with every other node 2-5 nodes away. If they are on the edge, wrap around. (grids probably wouldn't be too large in size to transmit to each other, depends how complex the ALife is, vary depending on how redundant / complex the system is)
This could also be done via ping as well since that tends to be a good way of seeing how close people are without overly-complex systems to find out where people are.
If a node goes offline, nearby nodes will take over their grids processing by the usual job system methods. This way, nothing just ends up becoming a blackhole of non-evolution.
If after 6 months the node doesn't come back on, it officially gets labelled as abandoned and gets added in to a list where people can manually take control of the grid. The grid will still be CPU-shared until a new owner takes over it.
If more grids nearby go offline, someone who isn't CPU-sharing with other nodes can be assigned jobs at random.
This should, in theory, prevent the entire system collapsing if even half the nodes fell off the map.
It all just depends how complex the system will be.
But if it is going to be done the way i think it is, it really shouldn't take too much to send that amount of data between nodes every other minute or so.
Will it happen? Doubt it. But i can dream.
Also, this is an overly simplistic explanation of the system. I don't want to waste peoples time on a huge post about something they'd probably ignore.
It is also late and i have a terribly sore head, so ignore the many mistakes i have likely made.
If he succeeds with this wont this prove intelligent design as an origin for life? I mean this will be a known life form that has been observed to be intelligently designed.
If you like this, read his book-goes through his approach in building Lucy, his robot. Very different approach to traditional AI, but absolutely fascinating
Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps
He's also got a book about how he designed the creature game, both really interesting, highly recommended!
Kickstarter seems like a very good idea and I'm glad I followed the links related to this particular post. ./ post, this "One man's quest" received some additional coin from me as well, since I consider his track-record impressive enough to warrant belief in his next enterprise.
There are some great minds out there and I hope this sort of venue can help those people pursue what they excel at for the betterment of us all.
Thanks to the
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
It's a big job
link
The problem with this term is that scientists are working on true "artificial life" that is micro-organisms, that are manufactured. They try to use different base sets (not ACGT but artificial ones).
However I understand that AI is already a coined term so AL is logical, however misleading.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Incidentally (or, maybe, not ?) GOG is doing a promo this weekend on Kalypso games, including the Creatures series: http://www.gog.com/en/promo/kalypso_games
What a depressingly stupid machine.