ArtiFishial Life

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ArtiFishial Life

• By Jude Battista and
• Kendra Knudtzon

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ArtiFishial Life Project

• Goals for Project
• Modeling schooling
• Educational Tool
• Graphical Interface
• Extensible
• Paper presenting research and results

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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

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Prior Work, contd

• 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

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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

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Starlogo Implementation

• One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish
  (sort-of)
• and . Sharks
• Interactions
• Within a breed (Sociability)
• Among breeds (Fear)

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Starlogo Implementation

• Difficulties
• Defining neighborhoods of fish
• Complexity of rules we were trying to implement
• Printing debugging information

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Go Fish Demo
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Positive Results

• Fish Schooling Among Breeds
• Sociability determines closeness
• Fear of others (sharks)
• Easy interface for kids
• Nice bubbles (realistic-looking pond)

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Negative Aspects

• Buzzing (flipping) of fish
• Difficulties with fear of others versus
  sociability (weights)
• Wrapping of fish around pond edges

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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