Re: Announcement: Evo Artificial Life Framework

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "MK" == Michael Krumpus <address@hidden> writes:

MK> Fellow Swarmers,

MK> I have developed an alife framework built on top of Swarm called
MK> "Evo".  Evo is a development framework that allows Swarm
MK> developers to build agent-based simulations in order to study the
MK> evolution of behavior in environments that are crafted by the
MK> developer.  Evo employs biological operators such as genetic
MK> recombination and mutation to evolve the behavior of agents so
MK> that they are more adapted to their environment.  Evo is similar
MK> to genetic programming in the sense that the genome of an
MK> individual agent is a program that is executed. The Evo framework
MK> handles the generation and execution of these genomes.

MK> Evo is open source (of course!), is documented well, and comes
MK> with several example applications.  Read about and download Evo by
MK> visiting the Evo website at http://www.omicrongroup.org/evo.  Hope
MK> you like it!

[...I've Cc'ed my response to swarm-modelling, which is also where
folks should probably post followups, as well...]

Michael,

Congratulations, nice piece of work, well documented and
self-contained.  Definitely in the original spirit of the Swarm
project, especially in the idea of using Swarm as a scaffolding for
new application/domain-specific frameworks for simulation applications
which in turn could be used as further scaffolding for other
frameworks.  I hope that this will spur others along the same path.
Glad to see that it is Free Software (GPL), also.

In reference to a potential new Java version of `Evo' at some stage,
you may be interested in getting in touch with the SDG directly about
some prototyping being done in the arena of XML, Java and higher-level
modelling languages.  In case you haven't already seen it, an XML
prototype version of `heatbugs' has already been developed by Marcus
Daniels for a conference in Chicago in Oct. 1999:

 http://www.santafe.edu/~mgd/anlchicago.html

It may help, especially with any future rewrite of Evo, and to stay in
sync with Swarm, as this is one of the more possible directions the
project could take in the future.

Alex
-- 
Alex Lancaster * address@hidden * www.santafe.edu/~alex * 505 984-8800 x242
Santa Fe Institute (www.santafe.edu) & Swarm Development Group (www.swarm.org)







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