In this sub-unit I'm going to tell you

about one additional project, 
also due to Karl Sims,

published in 1994, and that is 
his work on

evolving virtual creatures.

This is a particularly fun and 
interesting project.

His goal was to evolve creatures that were
made up of these block-like structures

that could swim, hop, follow light,

and compete in certain ways,

which we'll see in a few minutes.

These were all virtual creatures, in that 
they existed inside of a

computer simulation of physics.

The goal here was to evolve 
these creatures

so that they were lifelike in some way.

Eventually, the idea was to be able
to evolve animations

for computer graphics that had 
lifelike properties

that could be used, for instance,

in movies, or other kinds 
of visual art projects.

This was a particularly complicated

application of the genetic algorithm,

because what Sims did was 
write an algorithm to

simultaneously evolve 
both the morphology,

that is, the shape of the creatures,

and their control systems, that is,

their artificial brains, 
or their neural networks.

The environment is a very detailed 
simulation of physics.

Now, before I get into the details 
of this project,

let me show you Karl Sims's own 
video,

which is in the next video link.