The Evolution of Beach Animals
If you’ve spoken to me during the past few weeks, I’ve no doubt told you about the project I’m on at work. That’s not what this post is about, however. For the project I’ve been on, we used the AS3 port of Box2D to manage our collision and physics. As I was working through figuring out how to use Box2D, I was checking out the demo file, and one of the demonstrations had this spidery walking machine, labeled as a “Theo Jansen Walker.” Of course, I couldn’t contain my curiousity, so to Google I went…>
Turns out that Theo Jansen is, quite simply, an evil genius. This guy is just throwing down some incredible stuff. It started, it seems, 21 years ago – Theo Jansen wrote a computer program that created virtual 4-legged walking machines that would race each other, and then emulate the winner, evolving towards increasingly faster machines. As a programmer, that is a cool enough concept for me, but he wasn’t satisfied – he decided to take the concept analog.
So he’s been building these multi-legged walking machines out of plastic tubing and cable ties. Let’s pause for a moment – he builds multi-legged machines. That walk. They capture the power of the wind, and they walk. How. Cool. Is. That.
STRANDBEESTEN from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.
And he keeps them evolving. He tries variations, and when something works, he takes that “dominant” gene and puts it into other machines. His ‘beach animals’ have even started to sprout wings, store compressed air into bottles for later use, or hammer themselves into the sand to ride out storms.
The cynic in me rolls my eyes a little at Mr. Jansen’s hope that someday his machines will be able to self-evolve, and that he’ll be able to turn them loose on the beach to live their own lives. But then again, with the strides he appears to be making, maybe he will be able to pull it off, at least a partial – beasts that can react to their surroundings well enough to go around obstacles and hardy enough to survive on their own. It’d really be quite something to see these things just crusing on a beach somewhere.
So check it out – it’s awesome. Not only is it awesome on a technical level, I really love the aesthetic of his beach animals.