My news aggregator picked up this story today. It's all about the efforts of a German university to use Artificial Life techniques to evolve realistic animal and human motion. The basic idea is that you build a model that has the same constraints as a real system, then genetic algorithms and neural networks to get your model come up with the best solution to the goal that you have set. It looks quite nice, but it doesn't seem to have moved on a great deal since the work of Karl Sims that I first encountered a decade ago. This was back in the good old days when I was involved with Artificial Life as part of my job.
The reason that the BBC picked up the story is because ALife XI is taking part in Winchester this week. I attended Alife V in Los Angeles a few years back and it was great fun. It was such a contrast to the normal academic conferences that I was used to. As well as the engineers and scientists there were also biologists, film makers and performance artists. Watching how the evolution of biological systems or whole ecosystems could be modelled and powerful and efficient the evolutionary process could be was fascinating.
Perhaps the brainwashed closed-minded students that Richard Dawkins had to deal with in his latest TV program would benefit from seeing how exciting and interesting ALife and evolution can be.
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