From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Sun Dec 19 1999 - 11:37:24 MST
In a message dated 12/19/99 9:12:07, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
>Related to this, has anyone played with "Creatures" or "Creatures II"?
>They are oldish games now and i can't seem to find them in computer
>stores. Can anyone tell me if they are worth searching for? As i
>understand it, they are neural network based artificial beings that run
>in a simulated environment. The architecture of their neural "brains"
>is dependent on genetic information. I have no idea what kind of
>simulated environment they run on, but supposedly, they had to learn
>what was food and what to avoid, etc. Anyone that can describe this in
>more detail or know of any other games/programs that do this kind of
>thing?
I played Creatures for about 4 hours. The principles are a hoot but the
creatures had to be constantly babysit and taught to eat, sleep, etc.
In principle they could do this instinctually but the instincts weren't
there in the first game. There are people who "genetically engineer"
the Norns with game editors. Without that, though, I thought it was
like housebreaking a puppy, repeated every couple of hours.
>From my understanding of the game it's a good sim for training and
breeding but not for evolution. The number of creatures was too
small for evolution to work properly in the first game. If it did
work, the biology of the game permits creatures to need no food,
live forever, regenerate, etc., with the proper mutations and so
I'd expect evolution to concern the development of those things
and not more "realistic" adaptations.
I saw a Creatures game for sale at Fry's last week. Creatures III, I
think. 6 new environments for your Norns to play in or something
like that.
It *is* interesting that the Norns get behavior from a simplistic
neural-net-like brain structure. They do demonstrate adaptive
behavior without explicit programming, and that's quite a nice trick.
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