I love this. In the 1980s and 1990s popular science magazines (such as Scientific American) would publish columns from people like AK Dewdney about things people could try to program at home....
I love this.
In the 1980s and 1990s popular science magazines (such as Scientific American) would publish columns from people like AK Dewdney about things people could try to program at home. These columns got collected into books too - The Armchair Universe and The Magic Machine.
Some of these articles were about artificial life. And people would write, and release, this software into the public domain or as shareware.
The problem is that they were working with limited hardware, and they were only one person, and so you'd have a dozen small programs doing very similar things - bugs move about, eating other bugs and getting energy, or not eating other bugs and dying. Very simple rules.
And then you'd have a couple of pieces of software that were very complex. Tierra, and Avida are two examples. And these aren't really things that people can just run to have a look at ALife. They required some effort to understand. There were other programs available and some of them were more accessible (framsticks) and some of them were more complex (polyworld).
Anyway, I enjoyed this video, and I hope to see more from them about this software.
I love this.
In the 1980s and 1990s popular science magazines (such as Scientific American) would publish columns from people like AK Dewdney about things people could try to program at home. These columns got collected into books too - The Armchair Universe and The Magic Machine.
Some of these articles were about artificial life. And people would write, and release, this software into the public domain or as shareware.
The problem is that they were working with limited hardware, and they were only one person, and so you'd have a dozen small programs doing very similar things - bugs move about, eating other bugs and getting energy, or not eating other bugs and dying. Very simple rules.
And then you'd have a couple of pieces of software that were very complex. Tierra, and Avida are two examples. And these aren't really things that people can just run to have a look at ALife. They required some effort to understand. There were other programs available and some of them were more accessible (framsticks) and some of them were more complex (polyworld).
Anyway, I enjoyed this video, and I hope to see more from them about this software.
If they make any more interesting ones, I'll be sure to post them here and give you a ping.