Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
SimCity, also known as Micropolis or SimCity Classic, is a city-building simulation video game developed by Will Wright, and released for several platforms from 1989 to 1991. SimCity features two-dimensional graphics and an overhead perspective. The game's objective is to create a city, develop residential and industrial areas, build infrastructure, and collect taxes for further city development. Importance is placed on increasing the population's standard of living, maintaining a balance between the different sectors, and monitoring the region's environmental situations to prevent the settlement from declining and going bankrupt.
The Sims is a social simulation video game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts in 2000. The game allows players to create and control virtual people, called “Sims”, and manage their daily lives in a suburban setting. The game features an open-ended gameplay, where players can choose their own goals and objectives, and customize their Sims’ appearance, personality, skills, relationships, and environment. A series of expansion packs were also released that add new content and features to the game, such as new careers, items, locations, and scenarios.
William Ralph Wright is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, which later became part of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders.
Creatures is an artificial life video game series created in the mid-1990s by English computer scientist Steve Grand while working for the Cambridge video game developer Millennium Interactive.
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-born American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He is the chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.
Creatures 2 is the second game in the Creatures artificial life game series made by Creature Labs, and the sequel to the 1996 game Creatures. It features three species: the cute, dependent Norns, the cantankerous Grendels and the industrious Ettins. The game tries to simulate life, and includes a complex two-dimensional ecology of plants, animals and insects, which provide the environment for the three main species to live and develop in. The player interacts with the world using a hand-shaped cursor, and tries to encourage the creatures' development by manipulating various objects around the world, guiding the creatures using the cursor and encouraging the creatures to speak.
Karl Sims is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation.
Noel Sharkey is a computer scientist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is best known to the British public for his appearances on television as an expert on robotics; including the BBC Two television series Robot Wars and Techno Games, and co-hosting Bright Sparks for BBC Northern Ireland. He is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield.
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).
Guerrilla Cambridge was a British video game developer based in Cambridge, England. The studio was founded under Sony Computer Entertainment in July 1997 through the buyout of the game development division of CyberLife Technology. In 2010, SCE Studio Cambridge was restructured as a sister studio to Guerrilla Games under the name Guerrilla Cambridge and shut down in 2017. The studio is best known for developing the MediEvil series.
Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and businessman. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.
Social simulation games are a subgenre of life simulation game that explore social interactions between multiple artificial lives. Some examples include The Sims and Animal Crossing series.
Dr Peter John Bentley is a British author and computer scientist based at University College London.
Orangutan Diaries is a nature documentary series on the BBC, which follows the lives of Bornean orangutans in the care of Lone Drøscher Nielsen, a member of the Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) foundation. The program tries to detail the threat that the orangutans face in day-to-day life. The presenters Michaela Strachan and Steve Leonard follow the careers of the orangutans daily to see what the centre has to deal with.
David T. Cliff is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and was formerly the Director of the UK Large-scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) Initiative. Cliff is the inventor of the seminal "ZIP" trading algorithm, one of the first of the current generation of autonomous adaptive algorithmic trading systems, which was demonstrated to outperform human traders in research published in 2001 by IBM. He is also the inventor on multiple international patents from the early 2000s concerning his invention hpDJ, the world's first fully automated disk-jockey (DJ) system for electronic dance music, the precursor to present-day DJ automation tools such as Traktor.
Artificial life is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American theoretical biologist, in 1986. In 1987 Langton organized the first conference on the field, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life researchers study traditional biology by trying to recreate aspects of biological phenomena.
Creatures is an artificial life simulation packaged as a video game developed by British studio Creature Labs for Windows, and was ported to Macintosh, PlayStation, and Game Boy Advance. It is the first game in the Creatures series.
AirSim is an open-source, cross platform simulator for drones, ground vehicles such as cars and various other objects, built on Epic Games’ proprietary Unreal Engine 4 as a platform for AI research. It is developed by Microsoft and can be used to experiment with deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. This allows testing of autonomous solutions without worrying about real-world damage.
