Projects were assigned to us soon after my previous post – I was put on an A-Life Challenge team. A-Life stands for artificial life, which is a type of artificial intelligence that mimics living systems and organisms.
The artificial life field is surprisingly well developed. Surprisingly for me at least, since the first I’d really heard of it was from a YouTube video I just happened to watch a week before this class started. The video depicted a simulation of prey and predators that slowly learned over time and modified their behavior to be more effective at their roles. It was fascinating to watch patterns like prey grouping together and predators working together to bring them down unfold, so when I saw the A-Life Challenge project listing, I immediately put it on my list.
Anyways, the field itself has been around since something like the 70s, and has really come a long way since then. The video I watched was just the tip of the iceberg – there are lots more like it, with many fascinating approaches. Most appear to employ some form of ML, which is also something that I have no experience with.
I liked the prey/predator paradigm from the video I saw so much that I pitched it to my teammates. Luckily, they both thought it would be cool to try it out! So, that’s what I’ll be working on for the rest of the course. Initially, we had planned to separate the project into three major pieces – GUI/animation, prey behavior, and predator behavior. Unfortunately, we lost one of our team members, which meant we had to compact things down to GUI/animation and general organism behavior. My teammate voiced an interest in trying out ML, so I volunteered to try heading up the GUI aspect of the project. I’ve also never done anything with GUIs or animation outside of basic web/mobile development, so I think this will be a great opportunity to learn some new things!
I’ve already begun creating the basic framework of the project and have an initial working version of the animation all coded up. The animation will be based on the turtle graphics library and the GUI will be based on the tkinter library. Next time, I plan to have much more of the development completed, and I’ll start getting into the weeds about my approach, as well as the basic flow of the framework of the program.
Until then!
Leave a Reply