1. The Day the Game Came Alive: Virtual Worlds and an Origin of Artificial Life Bruce Damer CIG2010 ITU Copenhagen Denmark August 18, 2010

15. ip

16. ip

17. Question: Could this happen and if so how do you get there from here?
Answer: We are going in that direction but it’s a long road. So lets look back at the short sixty year evolution of Artificial Life

18. 1946 – Eniac, programming by plug board

20. Enter John von Neumann

21. Birth of the First True Digital Computer The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ - 1946

22. Von Neumann Architecture

23. Robert Oppenheimer John von Neumann
Alan Richards photographer.  Courtesy of The Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA

24. The ECP: Compact, fast, stored program, world changing

25. ECP Program #3: Experiments in biometric evolution… 1953 report by Nils Als Baricelli

26. Baricelli “Blueprints”

27. Baricelli “Blueprints”

28. Punched Card Output Photo Captures first direct visual output of a program state (memory)

29. The world’s first Artificial Life program

30. Roll forward forty years to Tom Ray’s Tierra
Me and Tom Ray, Burgess Shale, 1997 Tierra: the iconic genomic evolution system, early 1990s – overload the network

31. 1996-97: Biota.org’s Nerve Garden
SIGGRAPH Electric Garden, 1997 First generative online world, early experiences (overloaded again)

32. And Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures
Early exemplar: Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures (1991-4)
Evolving Virtual Creatures by Karl Sims Inspired a generation of Soft Alife developers in the 1990s-2000s

33. Karl Sims: Evolving Virtual Creatures

34. 2000s - State of the art: “Soft” Artificial Life
Early exemplar: Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures (1991-4)

35. Avida self replicator

36. Challenge #1: ALife Engines are very different than Game Engines
Numerically computationally heavy
Graphically & interactionally heavy
Vast numbers of objects and interactions in bounded space
Limited number of objects in client spaces
Long periods of uninteresting behavior punctuated by unpredictable jumps in complexity
Continuous interesting things must happen for commercial success
Low reliability, high novelty, challenging to understand
Trustable guaranteed actions, presets, procedural or emergent behaviors “on demand”

37. Game Life is clocked to the Human experience
Artificial Life is clocked to the “Nature” or “Physics” of its own reality
So how to reconcile this?

38. Solution #1: Separate grids connecting engines

39. But can you “evolve” a good NPC given aggressive production schedules?
Perhaps not…

40. But is this viable?

41. For a part of a game or a whole ALife game?

42. And built SPORE instead
Will Wright said No
And built SPORE instead

43. Challenge #2: Computing Nature (?) Can Von Neumann Do It?
Sixty years later we are still living with the Von Neumann Bottleneck

44. Conventional vs Natural Computation Systemic Computer model by Peter J
Conventional vs Natural Computation Systemic Computer model by Peter J. Bentley, UCL, Digital Biology Group

45. Non-living natural world supports a massive number of parallel interactions but they are finite, bounded

46. Living natural world supports infinitely repeatable computations in a massively parallel fashion

47. e-coli, a massively parallel computing universe David S
e-coli, a massively parallel computing universe David S. Goodsell from The Machinery of Life

48. e-coli, a massively parallel computing universe

49. The complexity of Cytoplasm
A cube 100nm on the side contains roughly: proteins - 30 ribosomes tRNA molecules - several mRNA molecules - 30,000 small organic molecules (amino acids, nucleotides, sugars, ATP etc) - 50,000 ions - remaining 70% is water - all in continuous interaction

50. But what does a Whole Cell look like? Harvard’s Inner Life of a Cell
Roll tape!
But what does a Whole Cell look like? Harvard’s Inner Life of a Cell
Roll Tape!

51. Harvard’s Inner Life of a Cell

52. Model for a minimal cell

53. So can any kind of (Von Neumann) machine simulate a whole cell?
Definitely not
Low level approximations (overhead)
How about a lot of these?
Perhaps… for the equivalent of a small volume of aqueous chemicals, Anton: 1 microsecond per month

54. You need this…. to originate and evolve complex life (and civilization) Penny Boston, CONTACT Conference 2009, NASA Ames

55. So how to map this computer onto this one?
Perhaps…
…toil for a number of decades toward a most minimal type of “Singularity”, an Artificial Origin of Life

56. An “artificial origin of life” in cyberspace in this Century
The EvoGrid
An “artificial origin of life” in cyberspace in this Century

57. Roll tape!
Enter the EvoGrid
Roll Tape!

58. EvoGrid The Movie

59. EvoGrid early results

60. EvoGrid early results

61. EvoGrid early results

62. … but maybe one of you will rise to Challenge #2, the Origin of Artificial Life?

63. Closing Thought

64. Resources and Acknowledgements & Discussion
Project EvoGrid at:
Project Biota & Podcast at:
DigitalSpace 3D simulations and all (open) source code at:
We would also like to thank NASA and many others for funding support for this work. Other acknowledgements include: Dr. Richard Gordon at the University of Manitoba, Tom Barbalet, DM3D Studios, Peter Newman, Ryan DigitalSpace, SMARTLab, Jeff Clune/PicBreeder, Peter Bentley, University College London, FLiNT, Exploring Life’s Origins Project, Scientific American Frontiers, DigiBarn Computer Museum, The Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA, and S. Gross.