Darwin At Home

Via Boing Boing, here's a video of evolved walkers from a project called Darwin At Home.



The actual images are pretty good, although the use of slow-motion is annoying, the voice-overs are weird and lugubrious, and the whole thing moves too slowly. It's probably a lot more fun to watch when you're high.

The website is disappointing as well. I don't see any related publications, and the site is not very attractive or navigable. Still, it looks like they took an interesting approach to evolving morphologies, encoding and constructing the bodies kind of like balloon animals configured into triangles. I'd like to see a brief summary of the encoding and algorithm, for both morphologies and controllers. Maybe I'll write the author.