3D Virtual Creature Evolution Part 1: Videos

Inspiration is an important concern for Natural Selection, my current iPhone application under development. In communicating the inspiration for the app over recent weeks, I have reverted to accompanying any description I write with a link to a YouTube clip of Karl Sim's early 1990's research. I thought I would take some time to elaborate on this inspiration and dig up a bunch of related motivational resources.

I'm breaking this down into two posts, the first (this one) provides a collection of YouTube links to the results of 3D creature evolution, and the second longer more academic most summarises the state of research with lots of links to people and papers (I'll publish it in about a week).

An important element of broader success of the field of virtual creature evolution (and ALife) is the visual results it provides. Karl Sims is commonly referred to as the godfather of the of the study of evolved virtual creatures not because he released the first papers on the topic (he didn't), but because he (or someone close) ensured that digital videos of the work were released and popularised. Importantly, these videos are still around on the web and are held aloft as the seminal examples of this and the broader field can produce.

The two great video's of Sims' work I often share around are the following (they both have narration):

• Simulation of Evolution by Natural Selection
  
• Daniel Dennett - Is Evolution an Algorithmic Process? Part 4
  

Sims' creatures are adapted to address very specific and narrow goals in simulated 3D environments including: swimming speed, walking (distance from origin, total distance traveled), jumping, light following, and block possession.

Any searching of this topic on YouTube will very quickly turn up results related to Lee Graham's 3D Virtual Creature Evolution (3DVCE) project. The project offers software to design and run experiments for creature evolution as well as a distributed environment for more elaborate experiments. A very clever marketing strategy adopted by Graham (intentionally or otherwise) was to exploit YouTube to both publicise the fruits of his efforts, and as a database for the favourites and the 'zoo' of user submitted creatures. The effect is a near dominance of video-based searching on the topic.

There are far too many videos to list (and I have watched a large number of those that are out there). I've listed a broad pseudo-popular and interesting collection, as follows:

• Presentation to the Purdue Skeptics Society, April 2008 (6 parts including an overview of evolutionary computation and his project)
• Darwin Day 2008 - Evolved virtual creature compilation video
• End-over-end Worm - Evolved Virtual Creature (simply awesome!)
• Frog - Evolved Virtual Creature
• TAM6 - Evolved Virtual Creatures Video
• Virtual creature evolved for flat terrain
• HOW-TO Videos for 3D Virtual Creature Evolution (14 parts, interesting if you what to know details about the software)
  

Graham also links to an impressive number of related projects, providing an excellent summary of the state of web-available projects in the field.

Nicolas Lassabe has some interesting challenges involving walking, stair climbing, block pushing, walking across blocks, and even skateboarding:

• Evolving artificial creatures
  

Evo Runners (I can't access their blog either) provides some good videos, some with some excellent production quality, including:

• EvoRunners - result of 1000 generations
• EvoRunners Creatures
• EvoRunners Orgy
• EvoRunners - Generations
  

The AnimatLab have a very interesting video involving the evolution of different flapping strategies in a simulated bird:

• Evolution of neuro-controllers for a flapping-wing animat
  

I really love the videos by Tyler Streeter of his evolved humanoid jumping behaviour. It makes me laugh out loud every time!

• Jumping GA Man
• Artificial Evolution of Humanoid Jumping Behavior
• Artificial Evolution of Humanoid Standing Behavior
  

Finally, here are some additional random clips I came across and thought worthy of a look:

• Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence (google tech talk)
• Evolved virtual creatures (2007) (by ERO including walking, swimming, and following)
• Springs World 3D - Virtual Reality (using Springs World 3D)
• Evolving Virtual Catapults (Hitting a block as far as possible)
  

An excellent aggregation of videos and links in this field (inspiring this post) was compiled and published by Alex Champandard of AIGameDev last February entitled: Evolving Virtual Creatures: The Definitive Guide.

Please, if you know of some more/better videos of three dimensional creature evolution leave a comment or get into contact with me.