The University claims to be researching artificial intelligence, but something troubled me about the descriptions used in the lecture. It was aimed at a non-specialist audience, so I assume that they do far more than was described, but it seemed to me that the examples given were of merely evaluating options from pre-defined lists until a successful outcome was found.

I know that the definition of intelligence in this context is debatable, but I had hoped to hear some discussion of systems reaching logical conclusions from basic precepts, even if that’s still a distant goal. At the end, I asked if they’d had any experience of unexpectedly complex behaviour spontaneously occuring, but all he responded with was a brief description of the concept of emergent behaviour and mentioned flocking.

I’m no expert in the subject, but there seems to be potential in the cross-over between genetic algorithms and neural networks to allow systems to experiment at random and learn from the results, which could then inform future experiments. I’d like to explore this further, but at Wolverhampton they write a lot of code in C++, which I wouldn’t dream of learning. Life’s too short for that.

This talk aims to shed some light on the current research and techniques that can be employed in the creation of challenging and sophisticated autonomous artificial intelligent characters used in interactive multimedia applications.

It’s part of a programme of lectures that included one examining criticisms of the lack of craft in contemporary art. I didn’t know about that one in time, but it sounds interesting. I’ll certainly be going to the one on Building Intelligence.

Interestingly, given the previous post about evolutionary computing, Jer has also released the code for his smart rockets, written in Actionscript, which navigate through obstacles by evolving their own individual firing patterns over time.

Not surprisingly, the book covers pioneers such as William Latham and Karl Sims. I was reminded of this because Create Digital Motion recently posted a 1994 animation of Sims’ work on evolving creatures. Yes, the graphics are crude by today’s standards, but that’s not the point. There are several clips of artificial life on YouTube here, here, here, here and, perhaps most impressively, here.

You’d need several things to run simulations like these, including a 3D environment and a physics engine as well as an understanding of how to apply the theory of genetic algorithms to grow self-propelled creatures. I’m still grappling with the last of these before even beginning to consider the others.

Create Digital Motion has an article about an exhibition in of Paik’s work in New York, and a link to an article on Rhizome about Paik and cybernetics.