Potential for an Artificial Life SDK
Tom Barbalet of the Biota.org podcast has asked for feedback on the contents of an Artificial Life SDK. This would allow video game developers to hook their physics engine into an already-present software toolkit for representing ALife in their games. This is a fascinating question, but the comments on his blog post haven’t resulted in a lot of useful responses.
I believe the first step is allowing a game developer to determine the physics engine, then providing something useful beyond that. What do “virtually embodied” artificial life entities do besides interact with their environment?
The answer includes all the other things that living things do; consume / excrete, reproduce, or communicate. A lot of that intimately ties into the physics engine of the application they’ll occupy (and therefore, might be difficult to implement).
If we want to grow beasties that are intelligent, we have to include ’smarts’ in that list. But more on this later.
In the meantime, how would we write some alife functionality into a library while allowing an outside physics engine rule the environment? More thinking is required…
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