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Karl Sims - Evolved Virtual Creatures, Evolution Simulation, 1994

MediaArtTube · 797.4K views · 2008-12-06 · 4:10

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Overview

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the classic reference for evolutionary simulation and genetic programming, an inspiration for many projects, with notes on evolution exploiting simulation bugs.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2014–2022

Topics

Creative coding & generative artEvolution & geneticsMachine learning & deep learning
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karl simsartificial lifegenetic algorithmsvirtual creaturesevolution

What people said

ehsankia · 2021-06 · Recommendation

Also relevant is Karl Sims' Evolving Virtual Creatures: [VIDEO] Not sure how they're connected, but I remember being obsessed with that paper and actually recreating it in 2D as a grad project.

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jal278 · 2014-06 · Recommendation

Something like evolving virtual creatures would be a fun (although pretty ambitious) addition [1]. There's a processing 2D virutal creatures model called sticky feet [2] (source available) that perhaps could be ported to js pretty quickly. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

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HaukeHi · 2022-03 · Reference

I think evolution is not an undirected process in that sense because it's an optimization process, that optimizes to create more copies of itself. Superintelligence will likely use some Evolutionary Computation (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation ). Also see Karl Sims 'Creatures' from the 90s: [VIDEO] or OpenAI's Multi-Agent Hide and Seek: youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY

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Sources

Video by MediaArtTube, played through YouTube.

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