Monday, September 22, 2008

Contemplating Artificial Life...

I have long had a fascination with Artificial Life. My master's thesis at UCLA was evolving pack hunting and pack defense in artificial life forms. I thought it was an interesting project and it went well. I was quite surprised by the variety and completeness of the forms of hunting and defense that very simple organisms were capable of displaying. I was able to get my artificial life forms to display all of the kinds of hunting that were in a book on predatory behavior. My thesis was a parallel program written in C++. I am currently starting to port it to Python and I am going to present a talk on it at Py|Works "Exploring Artificial Intelligence with Python" . I hope that some of you can make it.

My ideal outcome would be to leverage my research and that of others to produce better, deeper, more realistic, and ultimately more fun creatures for games and education. Knowing how easy it is to evolve and/or run simple creatures that behave in amazing ways, I am constantly disappointed in the creatures that are out there in games today. I am also looking for people that would be interested in joining me in this pursuit. Do you love AI or online games? Would you love to make them better?

Let me know,
Jacob Taylor

2 comments:

alx said...

Hi Jacob,

I'm afraid that even though I'd been looking forward to your talk last week, I ended up missing it. Do you have any plans to write it up or share your slides? I'd be interested in reading more.

Cheers,

Alex.

Jacob Taylor said...

I have stared writing down more of it in my blog. See my latest entry. It is definitely something I am still exploring. Unfortunately, without the words, most of the slides have little to no meaning. I will likely publish some of the structural ones as images.