A-Life 2006
At one level, this installation is a simple metaphor encompassing the complexities of life, distilled down into the basic components of life, birth and death governed by the rules that control these events. At another level it is full of the subtleties and complexities of life itself.
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This work pays “retrospective homage” both conceptually and stylistically to the early work of John Horton Conway’s “Game of Life” (published in Scientific American 223, October 1970) and incorporates elements of Artificial Intelligence, Cellular Automata, Artificial Life and Gaming.
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Ever since its development, it has attracted much interest because of the surprising ways the life patterns can evolve. The Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organization. It has intrigued artists, biologists, mathematicians, economists, philosophers and others to observe the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules and their analogies with real life.
General Description
The Game of Life is well known to almost anyone who has ever programmed a computer, yet far fewer realise the level of sophistication that has been achieved in the design of Life patterns over the past four decades. The Game of Life has a rich structure that can only be appreciated fully by watching the intricate behavior that arises from such a simple set of rules. However, the patterns that exhibit such behavior must be designed carefully, as most Life patterns merely explode chaotically for a while and then stabilize.
The game of Life was developed by John Conway of Cambridge University in the late 1960s. It's a model for a simple ecosystem, but its basic rules give rise to surprising complexity. Conway was also interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by the renowned mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann tried to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules based on a Cartesian grid. Conway tried to simplify von Neumann's ideas and eventually succeeded. Coupling his previous success with Leech's problem in group theory, together with his interest in von Neuman's ideas concerning self-replicating machines resulted in the “Game of Life”.
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It made its first public appearance in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column. From a theoretical point of view, it is interesting because it has the power of a universal Turing machine: i.e. anything that can be computed algorithmically can be computed within Conway's Game of Life. It has often been claimed that since 1970 more computer time world-wide has been devoted to the Game of Life than any other single activity.
Gardner wrote: "The game made Conway instantly famous, but it also opened up a whole new field of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata... Because of Life's analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called 'simulation games' - games that resemble real-life processes."
Installation Description
This particular installation developed from re-visiting some of my earlier research interests in artificial life systems and in particular to previous ideas I was exploring in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s developing artificial life and eco systems through the medium of computer software. These early works were published in PAGE 49 (Computer Arts Society Quarterly, Autumn 1981) and inspired in part by the John Conway article and the notion of simple rule-sets that could lead to the development of complex systems, not just within the virtual domain of the computer software but made manifest in the physical world.
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The program initially describes a 50 x 50 x 50 unit cubic environment or world within which the artificial life-form or line is allowed to move and this could be observed from any viewpoint. The environment was divided equally into eight sectors and it was within these areas that the interaction coefficient changed from sector to sector i.e. areas where it could find food or areas to avoid due to a hostile environment. The only restriction placed on the life-form was that it was not allowed to retrace its immediately preceding direction of movement. It was however capable of scanning its immediate vicinity by three units in any direction.
Starting in the centre of its environment the objective of the program was for the life-form to negotiate any dangerous areas within a pre-determined number of moves. Once initiated, the program would run its course until the life-form was unable to negotiate its way around its environment, become trapped or unsuccessful in reaching a safe area.
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Following on from these ideas I developed the series Eco. II (1980-81), simulating the relationships between groups of cells and by assigning differing interactive coefficients, ‘species’ of the same group could be formed.
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Although these early works and ideas were developed at the start of the 1980s, they continue to intrigue with whole sub-cultures having since evolved both within the gaming world and within cellular automata areas and their applications.
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The installation presented here makes a retrospective “nod” to those earlier pioneering works and research and in particular to the work of John Conway of Cambridge University and the earlier work of the mathematician John von Neumann.
Technical Description
The A-Life installation consists of the main wall, approximately 3.4m wide x 2.9m high x 1.9m deep and a remote interface unit. The main part of the installation consists of the light emitting diode (LED) wall comprising a screen of modular LED units configured in a grid of 6 horizontal x 9 vertical modules. Each module is approximately 48cm x 24cm and contains 128 red led’s in a 16 x 8 matrix. Each modular board is controlled by an individual Scorpion K4 microprocessor which can operate independently or together with the other modules.
The main programme for the whole wall is contained within another master micro-computer, a Venom VM1 which processes the data for the wall and sends each successive life generation to three other slave VM1’s via an ethernet network. These slaves then send data simultaneously to control each of two columns of led modules via a local serial network.
The wireless remote interface unit consists simply of three industrial buttons and a joystick (up, down, left right) that allows the user to specify a starting group of cells for the A-life generation. The remote control unit is powered by a rechargeable lithium ion power source and communicates with the main computer via radio frequency transmission and as such can be sited anywhere within a range of 200 metres.
By navigating the wall via the joystick control and pressing a green select (0 1) button, the user can initiate a starting A-life pattern. A rapidly flashing led indicates that the selected cell will be “alive” (occupied), a slow flash indicates that the cell will be “dead” (vacant). By repeating these actions the user can create a starting generation of cells. By pressing the yellow start/stop (pause) button the A-life pattern will then begin to generate and evolve according to the life rules as described previously. The evolution of the A-life forms can be paused by pressing the yellow button again or by pressing the red button whilst in pause mode the wall will clear, allowing the user to re-enter another starting pattern.