Here’s an article on a virtual life experiment in the “online world” Second Life. To AI folks, it’s nothing groundbreaking: fish with flocking algorithms, fine-tuned by some artificial selection (upcoming plans seem to include sexual reproduction and natural selection). What’s really interesting is the social context. Second Life is a subscriber system providing a 3D world for interaction, gaming, and just plain messing around with stuff. It’s got its own scripting language and some tools for making in-system objects, and that’s what Surina Skallagrimson used to create her fishes.
What this means is, if you’re a SL subscriber you can visit these fish in their natural environment. The artifishies (sorry, couldn’t resist) are hanging out in a shared public virtual space. I don’t know if this is unique, but it’s the first ALife project I’ve heard about that doesn’t reside in its own purpose-built sandbox.
There is a SL group devoted to ALife, but you’ve got to be a subscriber to even view the forums :-( Still, this looks pretty promising. It costs, which counts me out at the moment (not much, but I could also see it devouring time). I’d hope to see more of this sort of thing in the coming years though, when *sigh* I have an income.
(Found via the excellent blog collision detection.)
2 Comments
SecondLife is now FREE. Come see the artifishies eat, breed, die and be eaten (there are predators as well now…) There are multiple food choices and each fish can develope a favorite food and pass that preference on to it’s offspring in DNA…
I had heard about this… I’ll probably be signing up fairly soon, but as an observer only. (Currently hardware-challenged, but I expect this to change in the next six months or so — a long time in SL, I know.)