Why virtual creatures matter

Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter

Thomas and Brown / Why virtual Worlds Can Matter 37 Virtual worlds are persistent, avatar-based social spaces that provide players or participants with the ability to engage in long-term, coordinated conjoined action. In these spaces, cultures and meanings emerge from a complex set of interactions among the participants, rather than as part of a predefined story or narrative arc. At least in pa...

Evolving Virtual Creatures and Catapults

We present a system that can evolve the morphology and the controller of virtual walking and block-throwing creatures (catapults) using a genetic algorithm. The system is based on Sims' work, implemented as a flexible platform with an off-the-shelf dynamics engine. Experiments aimed at evolving Sims-type walkers resulted in the emergence of various realistic gaits while using fairly simple obje...

Evolving Adaptation in Virtual Creatures

The Problem: The simulated evolution of virtual creatures has produced many intriguing demonstrations, providing simple locomotion abilities and strategies for simple competetive games. However, to achieve a richer set of behaviours, adaptation within the individual’s lifetime is being explored. Can evolution be used to learn domain specific rules for solving the credit assignment problem and s...

From Virtual Creatures to Feasible Robots

This paper provides a brief description of the robots obtained using the evolutionary design system called EDHMoR (Evolutionary Designer of Heterogeneous Modular Robots) that are displayed in the corresponding video [1]. This system is based on the coevolution of morphology and control with the main objective of obtaining feasible and manufacturable robots. To this end, a modular architecture h...

Evolving Legged Locomotion in Virtual Creatures