Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

While most of the artificial intelligent design of websites has come in the form of ‘Mechanical Turks’ better known as Web 2.0. Here is someone using an evolution algorithm to design a website.

Matthew Hockenberry and Ernesto Arroyo of Creative Synthesis, a non-profit organisation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created evolutionary software that alters colours, fonts and hyperlinks of pages in response to what seems to grab the attention of the people who click on the site. See Creative Synthesis for more. [ read more Web pages come alive and start breeding]

They defined the design of a webpage as a search problem. Then they broke html and css elements up into the smallest possible items. Those items are the dna, the webpage is the environment.

The best design attracts the most and longest attention. Here is the end result and some of the designs along the way AAAI.jpg

Human Tended Gardens of Evolutionary Design

Biota has podcasts, several open source artificial life projects, and papers all available for you to use. Biota exists to promote and assist the creation of biologically inspired artificial life forms in digital ecosystems. ( See the links page for a list of several projects )

The mission of Biota.org is to promote and assist in the engineering of complete, biologically-inspired, synthetic ecosystems and organisms. This involves the creation and deployment of digital tools and environments for simulation, research, and learning about living systems both natural and artificial. These tools could range from simple genetic algorithms all the way up to full multi-user virtual environments. Biota.org will seek to nourish a community of interest and to bring the experience of interacting with digital biota to a large audience through the medium of the Internet. Cyberbiology is Artificial Life made visible through Cyberspace.

More information:
Biota

Developed by Tom Ray, Tierra is a program that allows simple computer code to evolve and reproduce. Ray originally began as a biologist studying evolution and hoped to create an electric powered evolution machine to better study evolution. A friend in computer science and the current ( 1980s ) rash of computer viruses gave him the idea he needed.

To keep his creations from escaping or crashing his computer with bad code he wrote a computer emulator and let his creations loose in there. The first creation was an 80 byte program designed to fill in a free memory space on his computer with a copy of itself. Each program would continue its reproduction. The programs scrambled a few bits during the copy. If a program was broken enough to damage the computer or got too old it would be killed off.

After billions of generations working mutants appeared. Smaller programs doing the best since they needed the least resources. Parasites appeared which used other programs code to reproduce themselves. Programs would then evolve that had immunity to the parasites. Social programs evolved that would cooperate or steal from each other.

The algorithm has been on the internet and you can download it and experiment with Tom Rays programs.

More information and code:
Tierra home page