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.