Little Spikey Land - November 2003

Well now I'm happy!

I have made the parameter that controls an agents "field of vision" evolvable. In this case all agents started off with fields of vision of 180° (ie they can see in front and to the left and right). I created two species one coloured blue and specified as being herbivores, the other coloured red and carnivorous. The interesting thing is that after a while the carnivores and herbivores have differentiated by field of vision quite well.

In the above picture you can see (from the black lines) that the herbivore now has a field of vision that allows it see partially behind it. This is great for when it is being chased (particularly as the carnivores are slightly faster). Conversely the carnivore has a field of vision that is slightly more forward looking. This lets it stay a bit more "focused" on it's target.

The best thing about this is that this is what you would expect from real life predators and prey. Think cat (forward looking) versus mouse (eyes on side of head, lets it look around).

The only weird (but still interesting) thing at the moment is that the predators tend to stay in one place and turn on the spot. This seem to work fairly well as they can scan the "horizon" for incoming herbivores and pounce on them when they appear!

posted at 6:08 PM John

Just read a really nice web comic yesterday called Same Difference. The art is really good and in particular some of the expressions are so good. My favourite expression is of Nancy trying to persuade Simon to go to Pacifica (The 2nd panel has the best hand waving eyes upturned gesture ever).

Anyway, it's just a nice warm fuzzy story to read. I might even buy the book version at some point.

posted at 11:40 PM John

Here is a screen shot of part of my mini project. It shows the "Species Dialog" that lets you control the parameters of the agents. The coolest thing about it, is that you can change the number of sensors and the agents field of vision. You can have forward looking predators and prey with 360° vision if you want, or combinations in between.

Edited on: Saturday, November 22, 2003 10:53 PM
posted at 10:52 PM John

Ok, two more pictures. This time based on photos of Joss and Gemma. I must apologise for my crappy versions of them (they look much better in real life).

posted at 10:39 PM John

Here's a purple fairy. It's a bit more "normal" than my previous attempt at a fairy.

posted at 8:02 PM John

This one is based on a photo (hence why there is more shading and detail than normal).

posted at 9:16 PM John

Brown Hat Girl.

posted at 5:53 PM John

Work at Uni continues on my project. Nearly got evolution working in the virtual world I am making (Little Spikey Land 3?). I am at the stage of figuring out the wiring of my agents, such that they have more potential for evolving in interesting ways.

Kennon (who is doing Natural Computation at B'ham) pointed my in the direction of NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies). I had not come across it before. It lets you evolve ever more complex topologies, but still allows you to crossover Neural Networks that are not identical. Looks pretty good, so I think I might give it a go.

It should be useful from the co-evolution side of things, as I can then compare and contrast between NEAT (which allows for increases in complexity) to fixed network topologies.

posted at 8:02 PM John

More drawings. This time featuring the colour violet, as I bought some more inks.

First off we have a girl in a violet skirt (apologies to the person it is based on). Pretty happy with it, but the hands/arms aren't quite right.

Then we have a violet girl reclining. I really like this one, even though the marker I used for the black lines went a bit blotchy in places.

posted at 7:52 PM John

Steve Ballmer with an iPod.

posted at 9:17 PM John

Looked at Let's In again today. It's a "24 hour comic", i.e. the aim is to do a 24 page comic in 24 hours. This one was 21 pages in 26 hours.

Anyway, I then went and drew a little picture of a girl dancing which has the same sort of hair as in that comic.

Oh and I had some trouble with not setting my Linux box's clock, so earlier on this entry was from the future - the 11th of February 2005 to be exact!

posted at 9:05 PM John

First time clubbing for a while at the weekend. 'twas a student night in London. I felt old, even though I am only 25. There was also a heavy quotient of ironic people.

posted at 9:02 PM John