BEAGLE

Atari ST/Macintosh - 1995
Beagle was a logical part in my work. A ll this research about randomly generated games had to lead to Artificial life, Artificial behavior and, who knows, maybe to artificial intelligence on day...
This project was at the core of my Fine Art diploma and I passed with the jury's distinctions.




Beagle is a program that generates simple and basic "organisms" and let them live and evolve following basic internal rules. The main goal of the project was to create complexity and structure from simplicity. From simple building blocks, the system could generate countless organisms all able to interact with the world they are in and with each other. Interestingly, I saw appear behaviors I had never introduce in the original code, such as "flocking", and also some sorts of "predators" and "parasites".
For the first time I was really surprised by one of my games.



Sadly, the Atari ST was the only tool I had and it was starting to be dated back in 1995. So the representation of the organisms wasn't exactly what I was looking for... just schematics drawings giving me enough information to understand what was going on. Actually I don't even know if all the "mutation" and "evolution" algorithms worked ! The ST didn't have enough memory to run the necessary iterations.
For that matter, I later created more complex "organisms" as I wanted to see them...




I used an Apple Macintosh and StrataStudio PRO to generate these "organisms".
I wish one day I'll be able to carry on this (kind of) project and create and see all these things working in real-time...


Hammer ( born 28.11.1995 )

MacDO ( born ??? )

Hook ( born 19.11.1995 )

Pencil ( born 15.11.1995 )

Bones ( born ??? )

Hoover ( born 27.11.1995 )

BEAGLE is ©1995 - Laurent KERMEL