Kyresoo Plants
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kyresoo Plants are a form of artificial life, a digital organism in which a single seed cell repeatedly divides to produce a plant like object. Each cell is controlled by a simulated genome, which controls protein expression. The level of protein expression determines the behavior of the cell. The structure and appearance of the plant are an emergent property of the individual cell behavior. Tools are provided in the software to direct the evolution of plant forms by cross breeding (hybridization), mutation or direct genetic engineering of the gene string.
Kyresoo Plants were developed as an enabling technology for an online gardening game, which is still in development.
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[edit] Comparison with other ALife Software
Most Alife software such as Avida, Darwinbots, Polyworld, focus on the collective behaviour of a large number of simulated organisms. Kyresoo Plants focuses on the collective behavior of multiple cells in a single organism. In most ALife simulations, performance in the simulated world determines which organisms survive for further reproduction. Kyresoo Plants uses a directed evolution approach where the selection is made by a human on subjective criteria, in this case "beauty". In this it most closely follows the biomorph model, described by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker
[edit] Comparison with other digital plants
Digital plants are widely used in computer games and other 3D simulations. At their simplest, these are simply a static 2D image. More complex examples, such as the SpeedTree system, use a recursive procedure to map the location of trunks, branches and leaves. Known as L-systems, these recursive algorithms mimic the high level organization of many plants quite well. Kyresoo plants, on the other hand, mimic the low level organization of plants at the cellular level, and the higher level organization is emergent from that.
