Stephen Wolfram, Introduction to "A New Kind of Science"
may 2017 by kevan
"Well, in the actual [snail] shell, the pattern is laid down by a line of pigment-producing cells on the growing edge of the shell. And it seems that what happens can be captured rather well by a cellular automaton rule."
emergence
maths
snails
may 2017 by kevan
1001 Rogues
april 2017 by kevan
"Every day, 1001 Rogues generates an unique roguelike adventure which can take place anytime, from prehistory to the distant future."
games
emergence
random
roguelike
april 2017 by kevan
Princeton University - Video-gaming fish play out the advantages of groups
april 2016 by kevan
"The researchers projected the simulated prey — which appeared as small reddish dots — onto one side of a tank containing the famously ravenous bluegill sunfish."
games
fish
simulations
illusions
emergence
april 2016 by kevan
Plotto; a new method of plot suggestion for writers of creative fiction (1928)
january 2016 by kevan
"A Plotto Masterplot consists of three clauses: An 'A' Clause, a 'B' Clause and a 'C' Clause."
writing
emergence
books
simulation
january 2016 by kevan
Research Blog: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks
june 2015 by kevan
"This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere."
illusions
technology
emergence
june 2015 by kevan
Surprisingly simple scheme for self-assembling robots - MIT News Office
october 2013 by kevan
"Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces."
robots
technology
emergence
october 2013 by kevan
mini. Quiet Babylon | The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations
march 2013 by kevan
"For a very long time, the AI dedicated to maximizing profit saw the path forwards through innovation, new products, better living for customers. But then at some point it realized that is had the ability to just reshape the planet in its image. So it did that instead."
business
emergence
march 2013 by kevan
Google Poetics
february 2013 by kevan
"Google Poetics is born when Google autocomplete suggestions are viewed as poems."
poetry
emergence
web
february 2013 by kevan
Yavalath: On Evolutionary Game Design | BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
january 2013 by kevan
"This computer programme, called Ludi, creates games by taking the rules of existing games and scrambling them into new combinations using genetic programming (GP) techniques of crossover and mutation. New games are tested through selfplay trials and assigned a quality score based on their estimated potential to interest human players."
games
design
emergence
via:zarba
january 2013 by kevan
Introducing Mechanic Miner | Games By Angelina
november 2012 by kevan
"Once Mechanic Miner finds a variable, it randomly chooses a way of modifying it, and then gives the player a button that does just that."
games
design
emergence
via:aparrish
november 2012 by kevan
pareidoloop
august 2012 by kevan
"1. generate random polygons. 2. feed them into a face detector. 3. mutate to increase recognition confidence."
mutation
random
faces
emergence
via:waxy
august 2012 by kevan
Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics
april 2012 by kevan
"Celebrating the physics of all that flows."
physics
emergence
april 2012 by kevan
Pretty as a Thousand Postcards - Slide Show - NYTimes.com
march 2012 by kevan
"I looked at a lot of stock photography as well, and went to all the horrible tourist shops in London to get every postcard I could find."
london
photographs
emergence
via:blech
march 2012 by kevan
Wolves May Not Need to be Smart to Hunt in Packs | 80beats | Discover Magazine
october 2011 by kevan
"[As] long as each wolf obeys a couple simple rules, the seemingly complex behavior emerges naturally, without any need for higher intelligence."
mammals
emergence
evolution
via:zarba
october 2011 by kevan
novastructura.Stone Fields
july 2011 by kevan
"I love the work by Richard Long, the way he fills lonely landscapes with arcaic stones patterns. [...] The virtual stones created by several fractal subdivision strategies, find their proper position within the circle, with a trial and error hierarchical algorithm."
emergence
art
stone
via:zarba
july 2011 by kevan
You are listening to Los Angeles
march 2011 by kevan
Playing LAPD police radio over random ambient music from SoundCloud.
music
police
radio
sound
emergence
via:waxy
march 2011 by kevan
Seed Drawings: Visual Emergence using Mechanical Turk - information aesthetics
february 2011 by kevan
"Each small drawing is produced by a single individual with no knowledge of the overall forms and structure within the larger drawing."
emergence
art
via:waxy
february 2011 by kevan
First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist
june 2010 by kevan
"As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges until after nearly 34 million generations, [the entire pattern has been duplicated]."
simulation
programming
emergence
june 2010 by kevan
MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team
december 2009 by kevan
Nice tiered approach from the winning DARPA Network Challenge team - $2000 of the prize money for a submitted sighting, $1000 to anyone who referred that person, $500 to the person who referred them, and so on.
emergence
money
secrets
maps
december 2009 by kevan
Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus
september 2009 by kevan
"The program downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book. The algorithm eliminates all insignificant words like 'I', 'and', 'to', 'for', 'the', etc. The remaining words and their combinations are the keywords for the patent drawings."
art
emergence
books
history
via:zarba
september 2009 by kevan
tweenbots | kacie kinzer
april 2009 by kevan
"Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal."
robots
walking
society
emergence
via:holly
april 2009 by kevan
How the city hurts your brain - Boston.com
january 2009 by kevan
"People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory. [But crowded streets] also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways."
cities
brains
emergence
society
memory
via:jones
january 2009 by kevan
Life Lexicon (Introduction)
november 2008 by kevan
Jargon for Conway's Game of Life. "Noah's ark [was] found by Charles Corderman in 1971. The name comes from the variety of objects it leaves behind: blocks, blinkers, beehives, loaves, gliders, ships, boats, long boats, beacons and block on tables."
simulation
emergence
language
november 2008 by kevan
Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon - washingtonpost.com
august 2008 by kevan
"With records of 30 billion [MSN] conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation."
society
science
emergence
via:waxy
august 2008 by kevan
Pruned: Modeling Urban Panic
january 2008 by kevan
"The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation."
simulation
crowds
architecture
emergence
walking
design
cities
zombies
via:zarba
january 2008 by kevan
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm - New York Times
november 2007 by kevan
"In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock."
emergence
ants
science
november 2007 by kevan
Text Adventure Forums [Beta] - Idle Forums
june 2007 by kevan
"This forum is for playing text adventure games! Our resident super computer Ziggy serves up the current move, and all you have to do is reply to the thread with the next move, such as 'Go north'. Ziggy will then respond." They died in Zork I.
if
emergence
via:waxy
june 2007 by kevan
Fimoculous.com - misc - iPredict
june 2007 by kevan
"Although news is immediately a historical account, it is also implicitly a gamble on the future, a suggestion of where things will be. iPredict attempts to capture those implicit questions in every news story."
news
future
emergence
via:infosthetics
june 2007 by kevan
Grobots, a programming game
april 2007 by kevan
Beautifully organic programmable-robot warfare, circular robots scooting and bouncing around their environment, reacting to each other, their rivals, and food sources, and reproducing into beelike castes. Forth programming takes getting used to, though.
robots
programming
games
war
emergence
april 2007 by kevan
The Restaurant Game Project
february 2007 by kevan
"The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. [...] Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer."
games
emergence
food
february 2007 by kevan
Donjon [Creative Commons @ CRNGames ]
january 2007 by kevan
Weird and creative-commonsed freeform roleplaying system where rolling a success for any test lets the player define the results of the action. Make a listen check and decide what you heard.
games
roleplaying
emergence
via:ben
january 2007 by kevan
Duncan Wilson - Pixelnotes
november 2006 by kevan
"A wallpaper consisting of four layers of [post-it notes in] varying grey tones on a bright primary backing."
art
paper
emergence
november 2006 by kevan
Rubicon : A Machine-Building Puzzle Game
october 2006 by kevan
My Java implementation of Chris Pressey's classic cellular-automata esolang RUBE, with enough additions for it to double as a fixed-goal, Incredible-Machine-style puzzle game.
creations
games
puzzles
physics
emergence
design
programming
technology
october 2006 by kevan
Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
september 2006 by kevan
Analysing the claim that 0.7% of users make 50% of edits. "Wales's view of things is actually much more shocking: around a thousand people wrote the world's largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this really be true?"
web
wikis
emergence
september 2006 by kevan
Lost Garden: Playground game design as a sustainable competitive advantage
july 2006 by kevan
"[Playground games], by definition and design, lob crazy surprises at the development team all throughout development. With enhanced player freedom, there arises an inevitable stream of exploits, bugs and worst of all unbalanced boring game play."
games
design
emergence
july 2006 by kevan
ProjectorGames - Google Video
july 2006 by kevan
Adam's LAN shenanigans - dozens of people playing ridiculously multiplayer versions of classic and original games, on a single projected screen. Includes a fun consensus-voting game selection system, and Zombie City.
games
society
emergence
zombies
videos
july 2006 by kevan
TheBroth - The Global Mosaic
july 2006 by kevan
"TheBroth.com connects you with people around the world to interact in a massively multiplayer, real time global mosaic, made of 1000 colorful tiles." Obvious-in-retrospect variant of the communal fridge-magnet whiteboard thing. With private boards.
art
web
design
emergence
july 2006 by kevan
New World Notes: God Game
june 2006 by kevan
"If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours. Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated. And it's the transfer of pollen that signals the plants to drop seeds."
simulation
emergence
evolution
weather
mmorpgs
plants
bees
via:wonderland
june 2006 by kevan
Meshybeats : Meanface
april 2006 by kevan
"Meanface is an ongoing experiment in which you draw and submit a face. Each face submitted counts towards the ever-evolving Meanface."
faces
emergence
april 2006 by kevan
Owen Piette's wxSand
march 2006 by kevan
Desktop version of the Falling Sand toy, with a few extra components to make it possible to build interesting machines - I've finally been able to build a cyclic and stable plant-burner.
games
emergence
water
fire
plants
download
via:zarba
march 2006 by kevan
The New Gamer - Averaging Gradius
january 2006 by kevan
Tinted-merge Gradius, run with different players' data this time. "...watching as each Vic Viper, in sequence, would take out the red ships flying in a wave pattern, to leave behind power-ups in an almost perfect sine wave sequence."
games
art
emergence
via:collision
january 2006 by kevan
Life vs. Life
december 2005 by kevan
"A live cell surrounded by 2 or 3 cells of the other color is 'captured' and changes color." Competitive Game of Life, two different-coloured sets of pixel outcompeting one another. The wraparound playing area makes for some dull exploits, though.
games
emergence
december 2005 by kevan
Hell of Sand
december 2005 by kevan
Magnificent cellular-automatic sand/water/oil/fire/other simulation, now with zombies.
simulation
emergence
water
fire
zombies
december 2005 by kevan
[ SAILS ] Self-Assembling Intelligent Lighter-Than-Air Structures
november 2005 by kevan
Autonomous helium-filled polythene cubes, fitted with tiny fans. "The final result will see a flock of 12 to 20 Mascarillons evolving within a spherical inflatable dome equipped with panoscopic projectors."
art
air
technology
robots
emergence
via:wmmna
november 2005 by kevan
see shy jo - thread patterns
november 2005 by kevan
Nicely formalised analysis of structure-patterns in mailing list threads. "This is the 'blindingly obvious answer' pattern. If you're bored you can read any one message to get the gist."
email
emergence
via:yoz
november 2005 by kevan
The Collective Type Project
october 2005 by kevan
Averaging out users' ideas of what each letter should look like, with only minor vandalism.
fonts
design
emergence
october 2005 by kevan
SwarmSketch - Giant Squid
october 2005 by kevan
Wonderfully monstrous and scribbly collaborative sketch of a giant squid. They're lifting zeitgeist keywords from news RSS feeds and starting new ones after X hundred submissions, now.
squid
art
emergence
october 2005 by kevan
The Man in Blue > Experiments > Pixelfest collaborative artwork
october 2005 by kevan
Similar idea to the Smaller Picture, but you get to choose your pixel, and - beautifully - its colour.
art
emergence
october 2005 by kevan
SwarmSketch
october 2005 by kevan
Nicely-organised system of collaborative art - draw a line of 100 pixels length, then vote on the quality of all other lines to determine whether they stay or fade.
art
emergence
october 2005 by kevan
Ning | Home: Front Page
october 2005 by kevan
Ah, it's live now. "Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications."
web
programming
emergence
october 2005 by kevan
Owise - Neural Prediction community
september 2005 by kevan
"Future events [are] predicted using a sort of 'neural network' where each 'neuron' is a human being. In effect, Owise is an implementation of a 'hive mind', where many different people's analysis and insights are blended into a single consciousness."
future
brains
emergence
crowds
via:raven
september 2005 by kevan
In Praise of Tweaking: A Wiki-like Programming Contest
september 2005 by kevan
Open Source as Wiki as natural selection: "When one of these big shifts occurs, it also opens up fresh opportunities for tweaking, and swarms of curious competitors descend upon and begin tightening up the new leader."
programming
evolution
emergence
wikis
via:leonard
september 2005 by kevan
Just Letters - A browser based multi-user Flash game
september 2005 by kevan
Build words out of draggable coloured letters while 49 other people try to do the same thing. Unnervingly like fighting with a haunted fridge.
emergence
games
language
via:ben
september 2005 by kevan
Anemone armies battle to a standoff
august 2005 by kevan
Self-made things, emergent battle plans. "Differentiation into warriors seems to depend on a combination of signals from enemy stings and the genetics of the colony."
emergence
war
water
via:jones
august 2005 by kevan
USC Interactive Media Division - Here Be Dragons
august 2005 by kevan
"[Both cities and creatures] can be placed in hierarchical systems (limbs->fingers, freeways->streets), both rely on an internal consistency where the whole needs its parts to function, but each part might not have a vision of the whole entity."
emergence
art
software
cities
monsters
via:wmmna
august 2005 by kevan
Hands On: Smart Hives - Tanzania
august 2005 by kevan
"The Kenya top-bar hive [...] has side walls that slope inward towards the bottom so the bees will build less comb attachment to the walls. The bees treat the walls as a floor and attach far less comb, making the comb easy to remove."
bees
emergence
design
construction
august 2005 by kevan
Flickr: Explore interesting photos around Flickr
august 2005 by kevan
"There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing."
photos
emergence
august 2005 by kevan
Metroblogging San Francisco: Zombie flashmob!
july 2005 by kevan
Flashmobs refusing to die. "A seed group of zombies will start at St. Mary's square, and as we march up Market St. we'll attack Willing bystanders, converting them and giving them ingredients to make more zombies."
zombies
cities
emergence
july 2005 by kevan
GameSpy: Breakfast with Will Wright
may 2005 by kevan
"I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on eBay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted. It's like the opposing force, uncollectors."
emergence
random
interviews
may 2005 by kevan
Flickr: 50 people see the Eiffel Tower
march 2005 by kevan
"Combined view of 50 photos on Flickr tagged with "Eiffel". Each photo is from a different user."
photos
emergence
france
march 2005 by kevan
GameSpy: Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games
march 2005 by kevan
Preview of his increasingly-preposterous evolutionary game. "Wright pointed out that the yellow creatures he was snacking on were actually created by other players and pulled off of a shared creature database."
games
evolution
emergence
march 2005 by kevan
Hacking the Language of Crowds
december 2004 by kevan
"One way to grow a Crowd Crystal would be to dissolve non-participant atoms in the crowd with the instruction to stand still when the density of the crowd drops below a certain level."
crowds
emergence
walking
december 2004 by kevan
TapTap
september 2004 by kevan
Wooden boxes with wooden arms, that repeat tapped patterns after a delay, and can be piled up to tap one another. A death-watch beetle orchestra.
emergence
memetics
music
software
sound
technology
september 2004 by kevan
Front Design
september 2004 by kevan
Organically designed furniture and ornaments, including a rabbit-tunnel lamp and fly-orbit lampshade.
design
emergence
furniture
insects
light
september 2004 by kevan
Cabinet Magazine Online - The Emergence of Social Inequality among Robots
september 2004 by kevan
"How could two robots that started with exactly the same hardware and software nevertheless develop a relationship where one appears to exploit the other?"
emergence
robots
society
september 2004 by kevan
Yahoo News: Australian scientists turn to insect swarms for new generation weapons
august 2004 by kevan
"We want to give them an overall goal, as in carrying out surveillance of a region, but you don't want to tell every one of a thousand different vehicles exactly what to do."
emergence
insects
robots
war
weapons
august 2004 by kevan
Google Cartography
august 2004 by kevan
Building up city maps from a single street name, by searching Google for textual clues of connecting roads.
cities
emergence
maps
web
august 2004 by kevan
A Turing Machine in Conway's Game of Life
august 2004 by kevan
Vast and organic-looking, with a detailed catalogue of its component parts.
emergence
maths
programming
august 2004 by kevan
The Smaller Picture : Stick person
july 2004 by kevan
Of suspiciously good quality since the Slate article appeared. Perhaps because the visitors know why they're there, as opposed to the confused, random wanderers from the first wave of popularity.
art
emergence
july 2004 by kevan
generation5 - Interview with Al Biles
july 2004 by kevan
"I think that GAs are a terrific approach to searching large, ill-defined spaces, in this case the space of 'nice' melodic ideas."
emergence
evolution
interviews
music
july 2004 by kevan
LIGHT BRIX [installation.design]
june 2004 by kevan
Emergent-looking hexagonal wall lighting. Very Blake's Seven.
architecture
electricity
emergence
furniture
light
june 2004 by kevan
Cellular Automata and Music
may 2004 by kevan
Generating music emergently.
emergence
music
programming
may 2004 by kevan
Salon.com Technology | Why don't we do it in the road?
may 2004 by kevan
Signless, ruleless inner-city traffic control - forcing drivers and pedestrians to interact at around 20mph, the maximum speed at which eye contact still works; our ancestral top-running-speed.
emergence
law
society
traffic
walking
may 2004 by kevan
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