Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 2.3
An image produced by Driessens and Verstappen's E-volver. Eight pixel modifying
agents build the image by modifying pixels. Notice the image contains coherent structures over
multiple levels of detail
the agents that created them. This suggests a collective self-organisation achieved
through agent-environment interaction, with the environment acting as a “memory”
that assists agents in building coherent structures within the image.
Like Di Scipio's sonic ecosystems, E-volver's “environment” is
the medium it-
self
(an image comprised of coloured pixels). For Eden, the real and virtual environ-
ments are causally connected through sound, human presence and the production of
resources. In both E-volver and Eden, agents modify their environment which, in
part, determines their behaviour. Causally coupling agent to environment allows for
feedback processes to be established, and the system thus becomes self-modifying.
This iterative self-modification process facilitates the emergence of heterogeneous
order and fractaline complexity from an environment of relative disorder and sim-
plicity. For Eden this is further expanded by the use of an evolutionary learning
system (based on a variant of Wilson's XCS (Wilson
1999
)) that introduces new
learning behaviours into the system. Learnt behaviours that have been beneficial
over an agent's lifetime are passed onto their offspring.
Unlike Eden's learning agents, E-volver's agents are not evolutionary over the
life of the ecosystem, yet they are evolved: a variation on the IGA allows the user
of the system to evolve ecosystem behaviours through aesthetic rejection (“death of
the unfittest”). The entire ecosystem (a set of eight agents and their environment)
is evolved, not individual agents within a single image. Selection is based on the
subjective qualities of the images produced by an individual ecosystem.
There are numerous other examples of successful artworks based on ecosystem
metaphors and processes. To return to the central questions of this chapter:
how
and
why
do they work successfully?
