I heard from Gerald de Jong recently that the first GreyThumb Netherlands meeting would be on June 24th.

Thanks to Alan Lundell, the video of the first official meeting of GreyThumb Silicon Valley from May 27th, 2008 is now available here. Enjoy!

Gerald de Jong and I spoke with Natalie and Dick Gordon on Friday's Biota Live. Following the recording Dick emailed me a paper which will be the concluding chapter to his Divine Action and Natural Selection: Questions of Science and Faith in Biological Evolution book (aka the Dick Gordon book project for frequent Biota Live listeners. Dick begins the paper;

The origin of life is one of the outstanding conundrums of modern biology, which has been tackled mostly from a chemical point of view. It is also the playground of creationists who use probability arguments to deny that life could ever have begun "at random". The latter (Babuna, 2008; Gotfryd, 2008; Gundogdu, 2008) especially like to quote scientists who express doubt, such as:

"In a popular lecture I once unflatteringly described the thinking of these scientists as a 'junkyard mentality'. Since this reference became widely and not quite accurately quoted I will repeat it here. A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe" (Hoyle, 1984).

I would like to suggest that artificial life (Alife) enthusiasts take up Fred Hoyle's challenge, that in a way they simulate a tornado going through a junkyard of parts, and come up with something we would all agree is alive, in the Alife sense, from components that are not alive in the Alife sense (Pennock, 2001; Pennock, 2007).

Dick is interested in feedback/dialogue by May 21st, 2008. He can be contacted directly.

We had Chris Hecker on Biota Live last night. A fantastic chat and a great opportunity to see the fastest route to get artificial life into games. Enjoy!

I have just published a chat with Brian Peltonen last Sunday. Brian and Adam Ierymenko also featured in today's Biota Live recording on the EvoGrid which I hope to have clean and published in the next day or so. Stay tuned!

There are two articles on the use of ALife themes in video games that I'd like to point out. One is on the autonomy of characters in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the other is on the living environment and creatures in the game Dwarf Fortress.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. features up to 1000 non-player characters with independent lives, goals and interactions that exist beyond the realm of the player's vicinity.

Dwarf Fortress is a complex, ASCII graphics based, independent game that features a fractally generated ecosystem, populated with thousands of persistent creatures with a dynamic economy.

Tom De Smedt has posted some pretty cool images and information from an evolving ecosystem of plant life called Superfolia. Superfolia is built atop NodeBox, which in turn is built atop Processing. Both Processing and NodeBox are open source and available for download.

Alex Champandard has put together a great collection of papers and web sites regarding evolving virtual creatures.

This is a great first stop for information and has links to research by Karl Sims, Nicolas Lassabe, Gene Ruebsamen, Thomas Miconi, Josh Bongard, Russel Smith, Maciej Komosinski, Szymon Ulatowski, Gregory Hornby and Jordan Pollack.

The creatures featured range from the early Sims creatures to flying creatures and humanoids.

New research suggests that flocking birds (in this case starlings) keep track of a fixed number of their nearest neighbors regardless of distance, not just those within a given radius.

From the article:

"Current computer models assume that each bird interacts with all birds within a certain distance. But the new observations, however, show that each bird keeps under control a fixed number of neighbours - seven other starlings - irrespective of their distance, which is the secret of how they stick together."

A researcher at Stanford has developed a program called Dryad to create synthetic trees.

From the article:

"When [Stanford computer scientist Vladlen Koltun], an assistant professor of computer science, set out with his Stanford Virtual Worlds Group to prove that object construction can be sophisticated without being difficult, they began with trees...

"The result is a new, intuitive way for individual users to create unique trees by simply using a mouse to seamlessly navigate through the entire 'space of trees,' changing appearances by changing direction. Koltun's software, Dryad (a tree nymph in Greek mythology,) lets users move through the 100-attribute tree space in a fashion similar to navigating city streets on Google Maps...

"An important feature of Dryad is an information-sharing technique that improves the software every time someone picks a tree."

From the New York Times' article:

"Taking a significant step toward the creation of synthetic forms of life, researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by stitching together its chemical components...

"Moreover, Dr. Venter’s team, led by a Nobel laureate, Hamilton O. Smith, has yet to accomplish the next — and biggest — step. That would be to insert the synthetic chromosome into a living microbe and have it 'boot up' and take control of the organism’s functions...

"The ability to synthesize genomes would allow for more scientific experimentation. Dr. Venter said he would now be able to create organisms missing dozens of genes to answer the initial question that inspired the research in 1995: What is the minimum set of genes needed for life?"

Other articles:
Science paper
Wired

Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

Recently, Sodaplay relaunched their site with what seems to be a near complete rewrite of the tool. For anyone who has not been there in a while, it might be a good time to play around with the physically simulated, creature model maker again.

Craig Tovey and Sunil Nakrani, researchers at Georgia Tech, have developed a dynamic server allocation algorithm based upon how bees recruit foragers. Their results show that the biomimetic algorithm is widely adaptive and performs well against benchmark algorithms.

Link to the paper in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

Though this is not a new show, I thought I would post on it. The BBC has been airing an ALife competition, called BAMZOOKi, for the past few years. Players create "ZOOks" on their home PCs then submit them, hoping to appear on the television show for a series of competitions between their ALife creatures and those of their rivals.

Here's a YouTube video summarizing the show.

This is cool: a "virtual planet" peopled by virtual creatures.

The Call for Papers for ALife XI is up! There's also a conference on computational intelligence on consumer game consoles and graphics hardware coming up.