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SKEW FROM RANDOM. "Digital organisms that have evolved through many generations display a curious pattern of instructions. "Some instructions are used much more often and some other instructions are used much, much, much less than their random occurrence." https://lnkd.in/d4b3fY4 View in LinkedIn

KARL SIMS, a digital media artist, computer graphics scientist, and entrepreneur (GenArts, special effects software); he worked at: Thinking Machines Corp, Optomystic, and Whitney/Demos Productions. Education: MIT Media Lab, and MIT undergraduate degree (life sciences). Awards included ARS Electronica Golden Nincas and McArthur "Genius Grant". http://www.karlsims.com/ View in LinkedIn

IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE. "Adami believes that his research may also prove useful in the search for extraterrestrial life. One of the difficult questions that astrobiologists struggle with is how they will be able to recognize the biosignature of life forms on other worlds that may have a different chemical foundation than life on Earth." https://lnkd.in/d4b3fY4 View in LinkedIn

"AVIDA is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research. The Avida system is based on concepts similar to those employed by the tierra program developed by Tom Ray. In lay terms, Avida is a digital world in which simple computer programs mutate and evolve. " https://lnkd.in/dZqxxrU View in LinkedIn

AVIDA. "The organisms exist as sequences of self-replicating computer code. The digital bugs evolve at lightning speed, and they leave tracks for scientists to study." https://lnkd.in/d4b3fY4 View in LinkedIn

STEP 2: GETTING BETTER. "Over time – Sims has run some experiments out to 300 generations – the creatures started behaving like real animals, wanting nothing more than to seize and keep the cube. Some developed arms to reach out and encircle it; others evolved large flat bodies to cover it. Some walked toward the cube, others hopped, paddled, or crawled." https://lnkd.in/dD4T763 View in LinkedIn

STEP 1: LUMPY START. "Two at a time were plopped down in an arena, facing a small cube. A battle commenced, and the computer measured the creatures' success in gaining control of the cube. Typically, the first generation did a lousy job. Most of the creatures simply sat there like, well, blocks; a few flopped or twitched, often away from the cube. But after each competition, the animal that had the better score was allowed to live – and to breed and mutate." https://lnkd.in/dD4T763 View in LinkedIn

HUMAN LIMITS. "The answer...is in "creating software to breed it. Few people can design something so complex—we don't have tools or imagination." https://lnkd.in/dtVFGBG View in LinkedIn

HUMAN-FREE. "In an earlier art-science project, Evolving Virtual Creatures, Sims left higher intelligence out of the loop, letting the computer provide both the variation and the selection of "winners." The 3-D world of Evolving Virtual Creatures – with physical laws such as gravity, friction, and fluid viscosity – was populated by crude animals built from rectangular blocks." https://lnkd.in/dD4T763 View in LinkedIn

"THE EVOLVED VIRTUAL CREATURES project was developed in 1994 at Thinking Machines Corporation. I was an Artist in Residence there, and was given the task of showing the computational ability of their Connection Machine (one of the first parallel processing supercomputers) in a visually demonstrable way." https://lnkd.in/dqVFHaZ View in LinkedIn