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client side, which is the code set of bottom rules, and has the DNA code of
growing into a complete digital creature in the environment program. Users can
revise the source code of the seed program to make the generated digital living
beings have special capabilities and habits. The seed program is divided 3 classes
including plant, animal, and microorganism programs, which can grow into three
kinds of digital living beings respectively by revising. The produced digital
living beings make up the food chain, and launch the struggle for existence. In
order to survive, digital living beings can unite to live, showing the phenomena
such as symbiosis, parasitics, etc. Finally, population scales of all kinds of living
beings reach the relative equilibrium state. If new species are joined in, the
equilibrium may be broken, and then the competition of new round is launched.
Because the competition is endless, users must generate new species repeatedly
to face the challenge for existence. The programmers of the environment
programs can also introduce the disasters such as aerolite, flood, drought, etc to
do destructive experiments on the survival capability of each species. The seed
program must be upgraded repeatedly, for example, if the definition of water is
added into the environment, the seed must take water as one of its key surviving
elements accordingly. Therefore, users must follow to upgrade repeatedly as well,
otherwise they will be extinct on the annual disaster day.
15.8.4
Artificial fish
Xiaoyuan Tu's thesis for the PhD degree at the University of Toronto, entitled
“Artificial Animals for Computer Animation: Biomechanics, Locomotion,
Perception, and Behavior”, won her the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in
1996. The main work of this thesis is researching on and developing the artificial
fish(Tu,1996).
The “artificial fish” created by Xiaoyuan Tu is a society of artificial shoal
which perch in the virtual sea world. Each artificial fish is an autonomous agent,
which can act independently as well as interact with each other. The “artificial
fish” have the “intention generator” corresponding to fish brain, and the virtual
perceptive organ corresponding to fish eyes based on computer vision. So it can
discern and perceive other artificial fish and the virtual marine environment
around. Each fish lives in the “sensing-acting” mode, and has intelligent
characteristics such as self-stimulating, self-learning, self-adaptation, etc. Based
on these characteristics, the corresponding intelligent behavior is generated, such
as seeking and eating food because of hunger, learning the bitter lessons of other
