Karl Sims (born 1962 [1] ) is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation.
Karl Sims (born 1962 [1] ) is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation.
Sims received a B.S. from MIT in 1984, and a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab in 1987. He has worked for supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines as an artist-in-residence, for Whitney/Demos Productions as a researcher, and co-founded Optomystic. Sims was the founder and CEO of GenArts, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that developed special effects plugins used in film and video production. In 2008 he moved to a role on the board of directors when Insight Partners acquired a majority stake in the company.
At Optomystic, Sims developed software for the Connection Machine 2 (CM-2) that animated the water from drawings of a deluge by Leonardo da Vinci, used in Mark Whitney's film Excerpts from Leonardo's Deluge.
Sims' animations Particle Dreams and Panspermia used the CM-2 to animate and render various complex phenomena via particle systems. Panspermia was also used as the video for Pantera's 1994 cover of Black Sabbath's "Planet Caravan".
Sims wrote landmark papers on virtual creatures and artificial evolution for computer art. His virtual creatures used an artificial neural network to process input from virtual sensors and act on virtual muscles between cuboid 'limbs'. [2] The creatures were evolved to display multiple modes of water and land based movements such as swimming like a sea snake or fish, jumping and tumbling (walking was not achieved). The creatures were also co-evolved in different species to compete for possession of a virtual cube, displaying the red queen effect. The cover of Artificial Life: An Overview by Chris Langton notably used an image of the creatures generated by Sims. In 1997, Sims created the interactive installation Galápagos for the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo; in this installation, viewers help evolve 3D animated creatures by selecting which ones will be allowed to live and produce new, mutated offspring.
His paper "Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics" described the application of genetic algorithms to generate abstract 2D images from complex mathematical formulae, evolved under the guidance of a human. He used this method to create the video Primordial Dance – which, according to one published study with supplementary video, calls to mind the history of early 20th century abstraction among its several evolutionary themes [3] [4] – as well as parts of Liquid Selves. Genetic Images was an interactive installation also based on this method; it was exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, 1993, as well as Ars Electronica and the Los Angeles Interactive Media Festival.
Sims received an Emmy Award in 2019 for outstanding achievement in engineering development. [5] In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He has won two Golden Nicas at Prix Ars Electronica, in 1991 and in 1992. [6] He has also received honors from Imagina, the National Computer Graphics Association, the Berlin Video Festival, NICOGRAPH, Images du Futur, and other festivals.
He is married to MIT professor Pattie Maes. [7]
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SIGGRAPH is an annual conference centered around computer graphics organized by ACM, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia, a second conference held annually, has been held since 2008 in countries throughout Asia.
Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process. It can also refer to computational art that uses and engages with digital media.
Evolutionary art is a branch of generative art, in which the artist does not do the work of constructing the artwork, but rather lets a system do the construction. In evolutionary art, initially generated art is put through an iterated process of selection and modification to arrive at a final product, where it is the artist who is the selective agent.
A particle system is a technique in game physics, motion graphics, and computer graphics that uses many minute sprites, 3D models, or other graphic objects to simulate certain kinds of "fuzzy" phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to reproduce with conventional rendering techniques – usually highly chaotic systems, natural phenomena, or processes caused by chemical reactions.
Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds, and related group motion. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object. Reynolds' boid model is one example of a larger general concept, for which many other variations have been developed since. The closely related work of Ichiro Aoki is noteworthy because it was published in 1982 — five years before Reynolds' boids paper.
Interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) or aesthetic selection is a general term for methods of evolutionary computation that use human evaluation. Usually human evaluation is necessary when the form of fitness function is not known or the result of optimization should fit a particular user preference.
Evolutionary robotics is an embodied approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which robots are automatically designed using Darwinian principles of natural selection. The design of a robot, or a subsystem of a robot such as a neural controller, is optimized against a behavioral goal. Usually, designs are evaluated in simulations as fabricating thousands or millions of designs and testing them in the real world is prohibitively expensive in terms of time, money, and safety.
Life simulation games form a subgenre of simulation video games in which the player lives or controls one or more virtual characters. Such a game can revolve around "individuals and relationships, or it could be a simulation of an ecosystem". Other terms include artificial life game and simulated life game (SLG).
Rebecca Allen is an internationally recognized digital artist inspired by the aesthetics of motion, the study of perception and behavior and the potential of advanced technology. Her artwork, which spans four decades and takes the form of experimental video, large-scale performances, live simulations and virtual and augmented reality art installations, addresses issues of gender, identity and what it means to be human as technology redefines our sense of reality.
Fluid animation refers to computer graphics techniques for generating realistic animations of fluids such as water and smoke. Fluid animations are typically focused on emulating the qualitative visual behavior of a fluid, with less emphasis placed on rigorously correct physical results, although they often still rely on approximate solutions to the Euler equations or Navier–Stokes equations that govern real fluid physics. Fluid animation can be performed with different levels of complexity, ranging from time-consuming, high-quality animations for films, or visual effects, to simple and fast animations for real-time animations like computer games.
Maurice Benayoun is a French new-media artist, curator, and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong.
Dr. Charles A. Ofria is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, the director of the Digital Evolution (DEvo) Lab there, and Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. He is the son of the late Charles Ofria, who developed the first fully integrated shop management program for the automotive repair industry. Ofria attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Ward Melville High School in 1991. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics from Stony Brook University in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1999. Ofria's research focuses on the interplay between computer science and Darwinian evolution.
NEAT Particles is an interactive evolutionary computation program that enables users to evolve particle systems intended for use as special effects in video games or movie graphics. Rather than being hand-coded like typical particle systems, the behaviors of NEAT Particle effects are evolved by user preference. Therefore, non-programmer, non-artist users may evolve complex and unique special effects in real time. NEAT Particles is meant to augment and assist the time-consuming computer graphics content generation process. NEAT is short for Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies.
Jeffrey Ventrella is an algorithmic artist, software developer, and author known for his research in artificial life, virtual worlds, fractal curves, evolutionary art, and avatar body language. Ventrella was principal inventor and, with Will Harvey, co-founder of the virtual world There.
Andrew Paul Witkin was an American computer scientist who made major contributions in computer vision and computer graphics.
3D Virtual Creature Evolution, abbreviated to 3DVCE, is an artificial evolution simulation program created by Lee Graham. Its purpose is to visualize and research common themes in body plans and strategies to achieve a fitness function of the artificial organisms generated and maintained by the system in their given environment. The program was inspired by Karl Sims’ 1994 artificial evolution program, Evolved Virtual Creatures. The program is run through volunteers who download the program from the home website and return information from completed simulations. As of March 4, 2013, it is available to download on Windows, MacOS, and in some cases Linux.
Physically based animation is an area of interest within computer graphics concerned with the simulation of physically plausible behaviors at interactive rates. Advances in physically based animation are often motivated by the need to include complex, physically inspired behaviors in video games, interactive simulations, and movies. Although off-line simulation methods exist to solve most all of the problems studied in physically-based animation, these methods are intended for applications that necessitate physical accuracy and slow, detailed computations. In contrast to methods common in offline simulation, techniques in physically based animation are concerned with physical plausibility, numerical stability, and visual appeal over physical accuracy. Physically based animation is often limited to loose approximations of physical behaviors because of the strict time constraints imposed by interactive applications. The target frame rate for interactive applications such as games and simulations is often 25-60 hertz, with only a small fraction of the time allotted to an individual frame remaining for physical simulation. Simplified models of physical behaviors are generally preferred if they are more efficient, easier to accelerate, or satisfy desirable mathematical properties. Fine details are not important when the overriding goal of a visualization is aesthetic appeal or the maintenance of player immersion since these details are often difficult for humans to notice or are otherwise impossible to distinguish at human scales.
Gene Pool is an artificial life simulation created by Jeffrey Ventrella in 1997. It features physics-based 2D proto-swimming creatures (swimbots) that compete for mates and food.
Specification gaming or reward hacking occurs when an AI optimizes an objective function—achieving the literal, formal specification of an objective—without actually achieving an outcome that the programmers intended. DeepMind researchers have analogized it to the human behavior of finding a "shortcut" when being evaluated: "In the real world, when rewarded for doing well on a homework assignment, a student might copy another student to get the right answers, rather than learning the material—and thus exploit a loophole in the task specification."
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