ArtiFishial Life

By Jude Battista and

Kendra Knudtzon

ArtiFishial Life Project

• Goals for Project– Modeling schooling

– Educational Tool

– Graphical Interface

– Extensible

• Paper presenting research and results

Prior Work

• Craig Reynolds - Flocks, Schools and Herds

• Tu and Terzopoulos - Artificial Fishes

• MIT Media Lab and Nearlife - Virtual Fish Tank

• Mitch Resnick - Beyond the Centralized Mindset

Prior Work, cont’d

• Robert Williamson - The Examination and Exploration of Algorithms and Complex Behaviour to Realistically Control Multiple Robots

• Moshe Sipper - An Introduction to Artificial Life, Lessons from Nature on Creating Life

• Ariel Dolan - Artificial Life on the Web http://www.aridolan.com

Approach

• Initially a Java applet

• Switched to a Starlogo program– Easier to implement simulation and have

a good interface• Similar to Logo, but with multiple turtles• Built-in parallelism

Starlogo Implementation

• One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish (sort-of)

• and …. Sharks

• Interactions:– Within a breed (Sociability)

– Among breeds (Fear)

Starlogo Implementation

• Difficulties– Defining neighborhoods of fish

– Complexity of rules we were trying to implement

– Printing debugging information

Go Fish Demo

Positive Results

• Fish Schooling Among Breeds

• Sociability determines closeness

• Fear of others (sharks)

• Easy interface for kids

• Nice bubbles (realistic-looking pond)

Negative Aspects

• “Buzzing” (flipping) of fish

• Difficulties with fear of others versus sociability (weights)

• Wrapping of fish around pond edges

Possibilities for Future Work

• Implement full-featured Sharks

• Dying (from collisions, etc)

• Add food pellets for prey fish

• Add divers (interactions with people)

• Obstacles

• Following behaviors (bubbles, shiny things)

• Train fish with a neural network