Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Posts Tagged ‘Emergence’

Agents, Behaviour, Emergence and Embodiment

In Imported, Uncategorized, Weblog on 3 November 2004 tagged Agents, Artificial-Intelligence, Books, Embodiment, Emergence, Links, Notes, Simulation, Software, Talks, Teaching with 1 comment

Here are my online references from a lecture I gave today at UCL.

• Wikipedia on AI, includes a paragraph on "neats" and "scruffies".
• Desire-lines & Emergent paths: a light-hearted presentation of a predictive model / apparently it wasn't Berkeley, Irvine, or the Oregon Experiment who tried to use it... has anyone actually tried it?
• Craig Reynolds' boids / Steering Behaviours (the individual steering behaviour examples are essential viewing) / an HP labs tech report on not evolving collective behaviour for fish / well explained pseudocode for boids / my quick 2D processing implementation of the pseudocode (commented code and 3D version available on request).
• Pedestrian Simulation: Alasdair Turner's EVAS agents / my post on the MSc VE weblog about a pedestrian sim project in the Alps / Crowd Dynamics (the design is terrible, but click main menu and scroll down to the "Myriad" section).
• Brandeis's DEMO lab: The Golem Project / Evolutionary Design / Evolution of Buildable Objects (LEGO)
• Stigmergy: a good academic intro (pdf, HTML summary here) / Dan Ladley's termite constructions.
• Karl Sims: evolved creatures / the "blockies" MPEG / a retrospective.
• The books I mentioned, all very accessible: Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology / Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams / Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
• The software/libraries I mentioned: steering behaviours work has spun off into a free open source library called Open Steer / Breve is a 3D environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life / Framsticks doesn't require programming knowledge / there is a demo of BEAST at David Gordon's homepage.

This will all be assimilated into my del.icio.us page shortly.

Turning Architects into Programmers

In Imported, Uncategorized, Weblog on 31 August 2004 tagged Architecture, Drawing, Emergence, Modelling, Programming, Sketching, Teaching with no comments

I'm preparing a lecture for architects interested in learning to program. In subsequent posts, I'll be writing some notes on the kinds of things I'll be talking about. These will include, but not be limited to, the following topics:

• Bottom-up vs. top-down methodologies (what Steven Johnson refers to in his book Emergence as "footprints not fiat")
• The relationship between parametric modelling and generative systems (including a tour through information theory - entropy/redundancy - and a discussion of degrees of freedom, dimensionality, etc.)
• The distinction between a drawing and a model, in the architectural and computer graphics sense.

I'll also be collecting links at delicious using the tag architectsandprogrammers.

Comments are open on this post, and I am open to suggestions. Any help (especially from architects-turned-programmers) will be gratefully received.