This past week I've been crawling through Theresa Willis's code and old news
posts, with one eye on Rune's inspirational Al, slowly learning how to walk.
Onscreen, that is.  All the while saying to myself "I wish I could use
Christoph Hormann's system to let my beings learn to walk for themselves."

Slashdot.org greets me this morning with this link: Discover Magazine Vol 24
#8 Aug 2003, Steven Johnson's article 'Darwin in a Box':
http://www.discover.com/aug_03/gthere.html?article=feattech.html,
describing Torsten Reil and his new company making animated characters move
realistically. Follow the Discover article links to the impressive demo
..avis: http://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/demos.htm. Good timing: SIGRAPH
is the July 27th in San Diego.

A decade ago Karl Sims wowed SIGRAPH with his "blockies"
http://www.biota.org/ksims/blockies/.  With luck one might find, somewhere
on the web, a now-rare 10M 'creatures-demo.mpg' showing them evolve on
Thinking Machines, or see them in a 1994 Scientific American Frontiers
episode as Alan Alda interviews Karl.  Many modellers here already have a
grasp of critter morphology.  Sims' control system is described on pp
302-303 of 'Evolutionary Design By Computers, Peter J. Bentley, ed.  Maciej
Komosinski and Szymon Ulatowski have gone beyond blockies with their
Framsticks: http://www.frams.poznan.pl/. The source is here:
http://www.frams.alife.pl/dev/index.html.

For deep background, genetic programming docs and code are here:
http://www.genetic-programming.org/

If we put GA/GP/framstick code and Christoph Hormann's simulation code
together in a nice bungalow for a while, how long before we see a baby
version of Reil's natural motion streaking the POV community?

Jim

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