Image of Complexity

We are now close to the end of this year. Another one. What was the most impressive image of complexity I have seen this year ? Probably this one. I take this picture at the top of the Tokyo City View tower last september. Imagine this at 250 meter above sea level offering 360-degree vistas of one of the most amazing city in the world: this is complexity. Happy christmas and happy new year humans...

M31 Project Continues...

We have designed a 3D multi-agent system for cosmological simulations with the following original features. There are three basic types of interacting agents: star agents, gaz cloud agents and dark matter agents. Each agent as its own properties like mass, density, velocity, etc., but also spin and viscosity (!). We can then study the space of possible universes by modifying most physical laws parameters. This is important in order to locate the "interesting universes", those which exhibit emergent structures and properties. This approach, I guess, can contribute to cosmology by locating the universe-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of the universe-as-it-could-be. In other terms, we apply the Artificial Life approach (thanks to C. Langton) to study the evolution of complexity at the cosmological level. The picture shows two early simulation results.

EVA version 3 - Work in Progress...

The earlier versions of the EVA project (Evolutionary Virtual Agent) were designed as C++ applications running under Windows. These versions included a simple real-time 3D engine for rendering the agent. The agent face 3D model used a small numbers of polygons (~100-500) focusing on a basic set of emotional expressions. This was inspired by the work done by Ken Perlin a few years ago with his "face demo". In the new implementation, we choose another graphical-rendering approach : a 2D animation engine that render the face in real-time by using a limited set of pre-computed 3D images. There are two main benefits of this approach: the face will be much more realistic without the need of a high-performance 3D engine, and the agent will be able to run in any web environment. The picture shows a preliminary design done by one of our student (thanks to Kevin). In the same meaning, we moved from a C++ “heavy” design to a “light” Java-based software architecture. The Eva “brain” engine is now based on a Scheme kernel (implemented in Java) which is well adapted for evolutionary experiments using the genetic programming paradigm.

First post

This is the first post. I will transfert the virtual-worlds.net web site soon...