The EvoGridAn Evolution Grid in

CyberspaceSMARTlab, UEL, London UK

July 10, 2008Bruce Damer

What is Biota? What is Artificial Life, and where is

A-Life today? What is the EvoGrid? How would the EvoGrid be

implemented? What would the EvoGrid be used

for?

EvoGrid:Itinerary

Biota.org (version 1.0)A multi-disciplinary visionary conference series 1997-2001paleontology, artificial life, simulation, virtual worlds, art, game design, science fiction

1998 –Cambridge UK 1999 – San Jose CA

2001 – Berkeley CA

1997 – Banff Canada, Burgess Shale

1997: Digital Biota Conferences: Digital Burgess(Banff Centre)

1998: Digital Biota 2(Cambridge UK, Magdalene College)

Biota.org ProjectsSIGGRAPH 1997: Nerve Garden - Growing gardens in cyberspace

Biota.org (version 2.0)Biota Podcast by Tom Barbalet(History, news, discussion about artificial life)

Early exemplar: Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures (1991-4)

What is Artificial LifeAnd what is the status of A-Life today?

Creatures with genomes evolving in the simulated physics of a Connection Machine.

Artificial Life:Exemplar: Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures

By Tom Barbalet, a number of autonomous simulation components including a landscape simulation, biological simulation, weather simulation, sentient creature (Noble Ape) simulation and a simple intelligent-agent scripting language (ApeScript).

Artificial Life:More recent projects: Noble Ape

Artificial Life:Grey Thumb A-life “clubs” growing, Grey Thumb Boston

A simple hypercycle that has evolved within a modified variant of the Nanopond evolvable instruction set virtual machine called Nanopond-MV. By Adam Ierymenko.

Artificial Life:More recent projects: Grey Thumb Boston-Nanopond

Ants collect aphids and food in an ant colony simulation written by Brian Peltonen.

Artificial Life:More recent projects: Grey Thumb Boston-Ant farm colony

Robot vision system using evolved algorithms annotating an image for depth and boundaries. By Martin C. Martin.

Artificial Life:More recent projects: Grey Thumb Boston-Robot Vision System

A physically simulated evolved agent in breve learns to walk. By Jonathan Klein.

Artificial Life:More recent projects: Grey Thumb Boston-Breve Evolved Agents

“Growing” L-System Garden with photo and chemo-tropism.

Artificial Life:More recent projects: Darwin’s Park, University of Paris

Evolving virtual creatures a la Karl Sims, using elastic interval geometry (tensegrity structures).

Artificial Life:Gerald de Jong: Darwin@Home

Artificial Life:Gerald de Jong: Darwin@Home

Artificial Life…NOT!

Artificial Life:Will Wright - Spore

EvoGrid:In Two Forms

EvoGrid Broad

Connecting existing A-life simulations to observe emergent behavior

EvoGrid Deep

Hoyle/Gordon’s “Origin of Artificial Life” simulation. Starting from “the void” and enabling a “cellular” structure and copying/mutation mechanism to emerge spontaneously.

EvoGrid:A new initiative for the Artificial Life communityConcept development stage (Q1-Q2 2008)

Early artificial life Grids: 1991-94, Karl Sims evolving virtual creatures on Connection Machine (2K processors), and Tom Ray’s Tierra, running across the Internet on servers (1992-98). World of Warcraft, Second Life today are all grids.

What would an artificial life Grid for the 21st Century look like? Running across the modern Internet: XML semantic spaces, web 2.0 interfaces

EvoGrid Broad:a new initiative for the Artificial Life communityConcept development stage (Q1-Q2 2008)

Imagine an L-System forest, a herbivore simulation and a carnivore simulation all developed separately without each having its own graphical front end. Each object in the separate simulations would communicate locally or via the network using some agreed upon protocol. Next, picture one or more 3D front end “view portals” with all the bells & whistles that visualize what is going on in the engines and traffic, putting any local “area” together into a coherent scene.

If it existed, such an A-life system could be run as a true grid, an “Evolution Grid” or “EvoGrid” which would take advantage of:

- Free from the tyranny of the render cycle clock- Use multi-core processors- Multiple engines, scenegraphs- Projects don’t go extinct once they become citizens of the grid- Whole system complexity and adaptation grows faster than individual parts

EvoGrid Broad:Concept Development – discussants so far:Tom Barbalet, Gerald de Jong, Jeffrey Ventrella, Robert Rice, Bruce Damer. Inviting more participants from Grey Thumb and beyond.What are the distributable atomic components of an

EvoGrid?1) Physics (laws determining how objects and energies change and interact over space and time)2) Genotype (determines 3, 4, 5, and 6 below)3) Sensors (how aspects of the environment (and the organism itself) are perceived and fed to the brain)4) Brain (takes sensor data, process it, and then affects the actuators)5) Actuators (what the brain affects)6) Geometry (organism bodies (objects) consisting of 3D coordinates, polygons, and parametric primitives (if any).)7) Rendering (It's sole job should be to render the geometry)

EvoGrid Broad:Concept Development – First cut XML ImplementationSample EvoGrid landscape and creature definitions (ref

Tom Barbalet)

<simulation signature="20033" version="687"> <landscape> <time minute="1148" day="82" century="0"/> <generator x="37303" y="22436"/> </landscape>

<being identification="23639"> <location x="4836.71" y="6055.46"/> <velocity facing="253.12" speed="656.25"/> <sex>female</sex> <energy>78.59</energy> <age>1.01</age> <state>awake</state> <state>moving</state> </being>

EvoGrid Deep:Concept Development

(Only at the very beginning of this thinking)

EvoGrid:Philosophical Implications

Will biologists (one day) declare these environments “worthy of study”?

Would an EvoGrid and harnessing the power of evolution become a tool for Humanity in the 21st Century? Would it become a mechanism for life’s expansion into the Solar System or for the survival and extension of life on Earth?

How does a successful origin of life simulation affect our sense of God, our place in the Universe and the future of life?

EvoGrid:PhD Research Goals

Framing the history, design issues, implementation possibilities, intellectual and philosophical issues around an EvoGrid.

Engaging a diverse community in the EvoGrid (Broad and Deep). Prototyping and EvoGrid.

Presenting the EvoGrid in the public sphere.

Encouraging or initiating the building of an EvoGrid.