Comments on: Designing a dune buggy genetically

By: Allen Pike

Allen Pike — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:50:07 +0000

Thanks for the link Duncan – the breveCreatures is a much fuller realization of the concept. Fun to watch and cooler output. It doesn’t give much instant gratification, but letting it run for a while helps.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:06:21 +0000

If you like watching that, check out the breveCreatures screen saver. It uses GAs to evolve walking 3D block creatures. It’s built on breve, a needless-to-say-awesome “3d Simulation Environment for Multi-Agent Simulations and Artificial Life”.

http://www.spiderland.org/screensaver

By: jkwiens.com: Genetic Algorithms

jkwiens.com: Genetic Algorithms — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 02:08:55 +0000

[...] an old co-worker linked to an applet which used genetic algorithms to design a dune buggy. Genetic Algorithms seem to be a very interesting way for machines to learn. Although Genetic [...]

By: Allen Pike

Allen Pike — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:43:01 +0000

You might have seen that he’s put a little notice warning that the applet has flaws and he wants to improve it. In the meantime, this has come up: http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/evolve/

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:56:29 +0000

I let it run overnight again, and it’s constructed a vehicle that matches what I’d expect much more than the previous overnight run. But it’s less successful by far than the previous overnight run, and it isn’t mutating it much between runs. Very interesting stuff.

By: Allen Pike

Allen Pike — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:44:03 +0000

Yeah, that one has a track that, as far as I know, it can’t run on indefinitely with the parameters it has. Too bad we can’t tweak that ourselves.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:53:39 +0000

Well, now that I’ve reset it, I think I was actually seeing success before. It would be nice to know what the program considered failure. It could just be a time limit, and no matter how efficient the buggy is it can only get a certain distance down the track.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:46:10 +0000

It’s been running for a day now in the background, and it’s still generating unlikely and unsuccessful buggies. It sounds like I should probably reset it.

By: Allen Pike

Allen Pike — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:19:58 +0000

As an algorithm designed to be watched in a browser, it has to converge pretty quickly or else it’ll be boring and tedious. If you’re running something that can iterate thousands or millions of times a second and run for a while, you’d give it more variables, bigger ranges, and more disruptive mutations to keep it from getting stuck in local maximums so quickly.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:00:27 +0000

At first, sure, it made me want to solve problems using genetic algorithms. But I let it run overnight, and it still hasn’t found a good buggy. So now I want to solve just the right subset of problems using genetic algorithms, and am going to research which those are.

Which I suppose is a better outcome anyway.