Category: genetic programming
-
Egg camouflage evolution tests in different nest sites
I’ve spent some time testing Project Nightjar EggLab: clicking on algorithmically generated eggs on backgrounds taken from nightjar nest sites and recording the time it takes for each egg. It’s designed for lots of people to play in parallel, but I wanted to test it before coming up with more gameplay mechanic ideas. The timing…
-
Visualising egg pattern genomes
A couple of screenshots from the upcoming Project Nightjar citizen science game – the genetic programming pattern generator is now working in a simple test framework, and even with myself as the only player at the moment, it’s gradually producing eggs that are harder and harder to find against one of the background images from…
-
More procedurally rendered eggs in HTML5 canvas
The first Project Nightjar game was a big success, with 6 thousand players in the first few days – so we’ll have lots of visual perception data to get through! Today I’ve been doing a bit more work on the egg generator for the next citizen science camouflage game: I’ve made 24 new, more naturalistic…
-
Genetic programming egg patterns in HTML5 canvas
Part of the ‘Project Nightjar’ camouflage work I’m doing for the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University is to design citizen science games we can build to do some research. One plan is to create lots of patterns in the browser that we can run perceptual models on for different predator animals, and use an…
-
Spork Factory: Amorphous Computing
Departing in a new direction after evolved light follower robots, take 500 processor cores spread out in space. Give them a simple instruction set which includes a instruction to copy (DMA) 8 bytes of their code/data to nearby cores (with an error rate of 0.5%). Fill the cores with random junk and set them running.…
-
Spork Factory: evolving a light follower robot
Continuing with the structured procrastination R&D project on evolvable hardware, I’m proud to report a pretty decent light following robot – this is a video of the first real-world test, with a program grown from primordial soup chasing me around: After creating a software model simulation of the robot in the last post, I added…
-
Evolvable hardware
I’m modding a robot toy for the next Spork Factory experiment, the chassis provides twin motor driven wheels and I’m replacing it’s brains with a circuit based on the ATtiny85 for running the results of the genetic algorithm, and a pair of light dependant resistors for ‘seeing’ with. Here’s the circuit (made in about 20…
-
Spork factory
A system for creating an abundance of useless software for tiny devices. Spork Factory evolves programs that run on Atmel processors – the same make as found on the Arduino, in this case the ATtiny85 – a £2.50 8 pin 8bit CPU. I’m currently simply using a piezo speaker as an output and evolving programs…
-
Evolving musical bytecode #3
For the next attempt in BetaBlocker bytecode evolution I wanted to favour patterns that had a rhythmic nature by measuring them with this function: (defn freq [l n] (defn _ [c] (cond (>= (+ c n) (count l)) 0 (= (nth l c) (nth l (+ c n))) (+ 1 (_ (+ c 1))) :else…
-
Evolving musical bytecode #2
Following on from the first BetaBlocker genetic algorithm bytecode experiments, in addition to the “most different notes” fitness function I added a similar calculation for the first derivative (ie. the difference between the notes in time order). This was an attempt to steer the evolution away from simple scales and into more complex patterns. (defn…