Evolving Physical Creatures

Framsticks: Towards a Simulation of a Nature-Like World, Creatures and Evolution

In this paper we describe our attempt to create a nature-like simulation model of artificial creatures. The model includes physical simulation of creatures, their interaction with the environment, their neural network control, and both directed and open-ended evolution. We describe a complex, three-dimensional simulation system, where various fitness criteria can be selected for evolving specie...

In Silicon No One Can Hear You Scream: Evolving Fighting Creatures

Virtual creatures operating in a physically realistic 3D environment, as originally introduced by Karl Sims, provide a challenging domain for artificial evolution. However, few coevolutionary experiments have been reported. Here we describe the results of our experiments on the evolution of physical combat among virtual creatures: essentially, we evolve creatures that trade blows with each othe...

Evolving a Diversity of Creatures through Novelty Search and Local Competition

An ambitious challenge in artificial life is to craft an evolutionary process that discovers a wide diversity of welladapted virtual creatures within a single run. Unlike in nature, evolving creatures in virtual worlds tend to converge to a single morphology because selection therein greedily rewards the morphology that is easiest to exploit. However, novelty search, a technique that explicitly...

Evolving Legged Locomotion in Virtual Creatures

Neuro - Morpho Evolution : What will happen if our body is not symmetric ?

In this study, we evolve both the controller and morphology of artificially embodied legged creatures. This is achieved by relaxing certain morphological constraints previously imposed on the artificial creature where the focus had only been on the optimization of its artificial neural network (ANN) controller. The first objective is to explore the legged locomotion behaviors that can be achiev...