Crowdsourcing Speeds Evolution of 3D Printable Objects

First time accepted submitter JimmyQS writes "The Cornell Creative Machines Lab, which brought us chatbots debating God and unicorns, has developed Endlessforms.com, a site using evolutionary algorithms and crowdsourcing to design objects that can be 3D printed in materials such as silver, steel or silicone. MIT's Technology Review says 'The rules EndlessForms uses to generate objects and their variants resemble those of developmental biology — the study of how DNA instructions unfold to create an entire living organism. [The Media Lab's Mediated Matter research group director Neri Oxman notes] that this could ultimately have an impact on design similar to the impact that blogs and social media have had on journalism, opening the field to the general public.' The New Scientist has a quick video tour."

Comments

Headline buzzword overload....

[mat catastrophe]

When you write a headline and you're trying to be "hip" by using "buzzwords", please try to put them in the order in which they are actually relevant to what's going on.

I had to read this one twice to figure out it wasn't about "crowdsourcing", or "evolution", but rather about the fact that "3-D Printable Objects are Evolving faster thanks to Crowdsourcing". /pedant

Boring

[duk242]

I went to the website, there was a bunch of boring 3D objects that could have been made by a 3 year old... Even the Thingiverse http://www.thingiverse.com/ is way more interesting and useful than that site.

Genomes, so objects look natural?

[Fuzzums]

I think this is crap. Objects look natural only because WE select objects that look interesting of resemble something we know, so by human selection, not natural selection, "strange" objects don't get evolved any further. That's all there is to the natural look of some of the objects.

3D Shapes from 30 years Ago...

[BoRegardless]

What is shown in the article looks like the basic elements from the first 3D packages on the PC 3 decades back.

Any multi-piece design today needs explicit, exact shape and size control if you are going to have function and fit required for produceable & usable assemblies today.

Re:Use Existing Models

[nurb432]

Here in the USA *everything* is copyrighted by default. Its all about the terms.. Many would be freely usable.

Copyright by itself does not restrict use.

Fixed it

[kenp2002]

Crowdsourcing accelerates evolution of 3D printable objects by leveraging the synergy of cloud computing resulting in a substantial paradigm shift in cost effective design.