Last Thursday I attended the first meeting of the Grey Thumb Silicon
Valley chapter in San Francisco. Grey Thumb is a non-profit
organization of people interested in artificial life and artificial
intelligence. The group started in Boston, MA and also has a London
chapter. There were about thirteen of us at the first meeting,
including Bruce Damer of Digital Space (http://www.digitalspace.com)
and Jeffrey Ventrella of Gene Pool (http://www.swimbots.com). We're
planning another meeting next month.
I'm looking forward to meeting with other software developers,
scientists, etc. of biological simulations and discuss ideas and
techniques with them. Artificial society/social simulations like the
Mars Simulation Project fit within the artificial life domain, but
most of the other projects that people in the group are involved with
seem to be more of the ecosystem/evolution simulations (not that I
don't find those interesting as well). I'm hoping that we might be
able to find ways to collaborate with scientists in the local
universities/NASA as well.
Here are some photos of the meeting. I'm the furthest right with the
baseball cap in the top photo.
Grey Thumb member Tom Barbalet hosts the weekly Biota podcast, which
covers artificial life software development topics. He invited anyone
who attended the silicon chapter meeting to call in for the following
podcast, so I did. Usually there are several callers on the podcast,
but that time I was the only one. So we spent a good hour chatting
about the Mars Simulation Project and how hobby ALife projects can
bridge the gap with industry and academia. I was invited to call in
on future podcasts as well.
So last week was quite busy for me. I'm hoping to get more ideas and
others interested in the Mars Simulation Project. Perhaps this will
lead to collaboration with other developers or projects.
Interesting podcast. I do find it a great shame that there is so little software available that simulates A-life. Back a decade or so we had the sim earth/life/farm stuff from Maxis, the Creature series, El-fish, etc. These were all clever simulations that ran on relatively low spec'd hardware. Unfortunately none of them presumably sold that well. Nowadays (with the exception of Spore) the interesting stuff seems to be done by independant developers such as yourself, or the guy who did AI Planet (now working on Naiture) the LDW team who did the vagualy A-life titles Plant and Fish tycoon (now working on their Village Sim games) and a few others.
I liked your idea's about bringing more 'traditional' A-life to MSP possibly via interaction of petri dish studies by the settlers. There are certainly many ways of bringing more ecology/cellular A-life into the sim. This could be done with plant or animal breeding to adapt plants or animals to the martian environment, or even extended to finding some form of life on Mars and simulating it and even having the settlers trying to encourage Martian life and helping it develop, or adapting certain low level life from earth and seeing if it could be helped to survive on Mars. Then of course there is the whole issue of terraforming, simulating Martian weather, etc.
As a platform for A-life I think MSP is in a perfect position to branch out in any number of directions.
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You might try out Gene Pool by Jeffrey Ventrella (http://www.swimbots.com), which is a really beautiful little evolution simulator. I've been chatting with Jeffrey some lately about ideas for it.
Tom Barbalet (who runs the Biota podcast) is the creator of Noble Ape (http://www.nobleape.com/sim/), which simulates biological organisms in a 3D terrain.
Bruce Damer has been working on the EvoGrid project, which will allow different ALife projects to communicate with one another. I'm not sure if the Mars Simulation Project will be able to work with it or not, but it might be possible.
Take care,
Scott
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Last Thursday I attended the first meeting of the Grey Thumb Silicon
Valley chapter in San Francisco. Grey Thumb is a non-profit
organization of people interested in artificial life and artificial
intelligence. The group started in Boston, MA and also has a London
chapter. There were about thirteen of us at the first meeting,
including Bruce Damer of Digital Space (http://www.digitalspace.com)
and Jeffrey Ventrella of Gene Pool (http://www.swimbots.com). We're
planning another meeting next month.
I'm looking forward to meeting with other software developers,
scientists, etc. of biological simulations and discuss ideas and
techniques with them. Artificial society/social simulations like the
Mars Simulation Project fit within the artificial life domain, but
most of the other projects that people in the group are involved with
seem to be more of the ecosystem/evolution simulations (not that I
don't find those interesting as well). I'm hoping that we might be
able to find ways to collaborate with scientists in the local
universities/NASA as well.
Here are some photos of the meeting. I'm the furthest right with the
baseball cap in the top photo.
http://www.greythumb.org/blog/index.php?/archives/300-GreyThumb-Silicon-Valley-meets-for-the-first-time.html
Here is the Grey Thumb website: http://www.greythumb.org
Grey Thumb member Tom Barbalet hosts the weekly Biota podcast, which
covers artificial life software development topics. He invited anyone
who attended the silicon chapter meeting to call in for the following
podcast, so I did. Usually there are several callers on the podcast,
but that time I was the only one. So we spent a good hour chatting
about the Mars Simulation Project and how hobby ALife projects can
bridge the gap with industry and academia. I was invited to call in
on future podcasts as well.
http://www.biota.org/podcast/ (it's podcast #15)
So last week was quite busy for me. I'm hoping to get more ideas and
others interested in the Mars Simulation Project. Perhaps this will
lead to collaboration with other developers or projects.
Take care,
Scott Davis
Mars Simulation Project
http://mars-sim.sf.net
scud1@users.sourceforge.net
Interesting podcast. I do find it a great shame that there is so little software available that simulates A-life. Back a decade or so we had the sim earth/life/farm stuff from Maxis, the Creature series, El-fish, etc. These were all clever simulations that ran on relatively low spec'd hardware. Unfortunately none of them presumably sold that well. Nowadays (with the exception of Spore) the interesting stuff seems to be done by independant developers such as yourself, or the guy who did AI Planet (now working on Naiture) the LDW team who did the vagualy A-life titles Plant and Fish tycoon (now working on their Village Sim games) and a few others.
I liked your idea's about bringing more 'traditional' A-life to MSP possibly via interaction of petri dish studies by the settlers. There are certainly many ways of bringing more ecology/cellular A-life into the sim. This could be done with plant or animal breeding to adapt plants or animals to the martian environment, or even extended to finding some form of life on Mars and simulating it and even having the settlers trying to encourage Martian life and helping it develop, or adapting certain low level life from earth and seeing if it could be helped to survive on Mars. Then of course there is the whole issue of terraforming, simulating Martian weather, etc.
As a platform for A-life I think MSP is in a perfect position to branch out in any number of directions.
You might try out Gene Pool by Jeffrey Ventrella (http://www.swimbots.com), which is a really beautiful little evolution simulator. I've been chatting with Jeffrey some lately about ideas for it.
Tom Barbalet (who runs the Biota podcast) is the creator of Noble Ape (http://www.nobleape.com/sim/), which simulates biological organisms in a 3D terrain.
Bruce Damer has been working on the EvoGrid project, which will allow different ALife projects to communicate with one another. I'm not sure if the Mars Simulation Project will be able to work with it or not, but it might be possible.
Take care,
Scott