Thanks For All The Fish
Bring the rich ecology of Indonesian Ocean to your screen and witness the potential of peer-to-peer computing approach combined with the use of Artificial Life technologies.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Elsewhere on the Web
|
• This New App Sounds Fishy
• First Look: DALiWorld Virtual Fish Tank
|
|
|
| |
|
Artificial Life (ALife) is one of the most fascinating scientific fields that could illuminate both fundamental biological questions and some complex engineering problems. Last year I described several ALife packages, software systems simulating virtual worlds populated with "digital organisms" that exhibit impressive lifelike behavior. For casual users, they are just cool things to watch. However, many of these systems are much more than that - serious research tools with many possible applications. One of the newcomers in this field, DALi Inc. (short for Distributed Artificial Life), is an infrastructure software company that is building a proprietary platform to support large-scale networked entertainment. They recently launched a new Java-based artificial life environment to showcase the power of peer-to-peer computing approach combined with the use of Artificial Life technologies. DALiWorld allows you to bring a virtual ocean to your screen, populated with a diverse and abundant ecology taken from the real Indonesian Ocean. You can easily build and influence the ecology of this world and create new life forms from scratch.
With so many cool screensavers available around the Net, you may ask what's the main purpose of this system? Different people posted different comments on the bulletin board at DALiWorld.net: Just to see other peoples fish-avatars jerking over my screen??? No thanks, Ill spend my computers idle time on something useful like fightAIDS@home! Of course, those omnipresent DOOM fanatics like things their way: You can have fish bombs to send to others aquariums! Then when it gets there, it will explode into a fishy mass and take all the other fish with it. But seriously, it can be a big step forward for a technology best known for song-swapping on the Web, providing a foundation for the next generation of large-scale multi-user games and other collaborative applications. Right now, an early beta release just displays colorful fish swimming on and off the screen, indicating where they've come from - I received several fish from Japan, USA and Australia just a few minutes after the installation process has finished. The concept is simple enough, but the underlying technology is everything but simple.
A sargassum triggerfish shows its passport while gliding by the camera
Just a short e-mail interview with Donnie Pinkston, one of the company's founders, revealed a sketch of a rich architecture working behind the scenes in your virtual aquarium. The fish have a complex cognitive model built along the lines of Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture. His behavioral decomposition approach decentralizes and divides tasks into different behavior "layers" running in parallel. There are no explicit world models and separation of data and computation - they are both distributed over the same network of simple elements. Layers can be added incrementally, and each behavior is reactive to the sensor input and the states of the "lower" layers. Every layer has the ability to override or subsume the behaviors of the lower layers, thus the term subsumption architecture comes into play. The motivation for this approach comes from the fact that it is much better to break down complex behavior into smaller, simpler behaviors that are easier to explain and implement.
Java3D at its best: tiger grouper patrols the central part of DALiWorld
The fish are also limited to localized observations of their environment, so they may only be able to see a certain distance, or only smell an object and not see it. This achieves a higher level of realism, but also requires a more robust cognitive model so that agents can act with partial or inaccurate information.
Teaching artificial fish to swim is not an easy task. DALi's development team gained a lot from the work of Karl Sims on the Blockies, and from Demetri Terzopoulos and Xiaoyuan Tu, who did extensive research on related topics. At their most fundamental level, all fish are genomically driven, which means that a vast array of mutations and evolutionary branches will be possible down the line. However, at this early point in the lifetime of DALiWorld, the fish are still unable to evolve or mate. On the other hand, mobile agent subsystem is functional: fish can "swim" half way around the world to another user's desktop. You can find out the various locations in the world a fish on your screen has visited, its place and date of origin, and its creator by right clicking on it to view its DALiWorld Passport.
DALi's development team has plans for evolving more elaborate ALife species. They are actively supporting cross-platform compatibility for various operating systems and computing devices, so Java comes like an ideal choice for this kind of job. More good news: I saw promises to release pieces of their technology as Open Source at the "appropriate time". The big vision is to realize the living global digital Gaia: a virtual ocean distributed across machines that span the entire non-virtual world; a community of millions of users all taking part in building this virtual ocean, creating the ecology and the life forms that inhabit it; the life forms seamlessly swimming from one machine to the next... Wish them luck: if they succeed, it will open a whole new world for massive multi-user games equipped with a full repertoire of AI techniques. And even if they don't, you'll keep a cool virtual aquarium filled with fish from all over the world.
All images reprinted with the permission of DALi, Inc.