It has been a long and quick several weeks of research and planning to create the ideas and ROUGH templates so far. I had no idea that I would ever dive so far into artificial life and what it means, what it can do, how to make one, and the many considerations and thoughts to keep in mind when creating one.
As a quick recap, the project that I am working on is the A-Life Challenge which is to create an artificial life environment. This project didn’t have a specific scope which has turned out to be a blessing and a curse all in one which I will explain shortly. We are simply to create an environment which organisms can grow and live in.
From the beginning our team has had many ideas and thoughts of what we can make, how we can make it, and how we can implement it. With an open scope, we had the freedom and ability to do what we wanted, however we wanted. We can choose our own organism structure to emulate, we can choose what in the environment is changing and what is needed in order to monitor and collect real and interesting data.
Despite this sounding like a dream research project and having the freedom to do whatever, we quickly found that each of us had an idea and they were almost always different. We also found that we can quickly get ahead of ourselves and create a project that would be too large to complete or too large to reasonably implement and complete. It means that we needed to quickly scale things back and slowly implement things.
What we have decided on doing is starting at a base and if time allows, we can implement more to make the project larger. This would be things like adding in tracking of statistics for individual cells in an environment rather than just saying that the entire environment is going to be the exact same temperature for example. While it would be cool to see this, it may not be easily done right from the start.
I primarily have been working on coming up with ideas for data processing and then ways to effectively use and display that data to make thoughtful, meaningful, and informed research. This has been harder than I originally thought as I figured that you could just get a bunch of data, average it and put it in a spread sheet. While you can do this and tables may be one way of displaying information that could be chosen, graphing was one of the most common and effective ways that I could see others using.
The ease in which I could scan a graph and get an idea for what was happening was surprising but made me realize that graphs would be the best way to display data with possibly a table to back up the information.
Overall, these last couple of weeks have been a blast getting to learn more about effective code libraries and finding how to accomplish a task I felt nervous about due to my lack of experience and knowledge. I am excited for the next update in order to share my other findings and progress of how this will go.
