Background

In the early 1990's Karl Sims, a Computer Scientist, developed an amazing program which allows one to breed images in open ended evolution. The images were drawn from digital genomes (analogous to biological DNA) which were interpreted into an image's phenotype (the resulting image). Sims stored the digital genomes as complex LISP structures which described how to draw an image. His software executed on massively parallel supercomputers and could draw amazingly complex and beautiful images very quickly. Sims eventually displayed the program in a museum, where spectators could help guide the evolution of the images by standing on pressure sensitive peddles below TV screens showing the images they liked the best.

Inspired by his work and the amazing results, In 1997 I wrote a quick prototype in C for the Macintosh. It tested my idea to store the digital genome, not as a LISP structure, but as a bytecode for a simple virtual machine. It worked better than I expected, but unfortunately I became much too busy with other matters to ever finish it.

In 1999, I took a Software Engineering course at the UofA which required writing a large project in teams of six people. I took this opportunity to suggest completing my old project which I still had a prototype of lying around. My group agreed and we spent the next 3 months working hard to develop BioGraphy 1.0. It wasn't perfect, but it was a success.

Now, in the summer of 1999, I am working hard on BioGraphy 2.0, a much improved version. Stay tuned for progress!.