Top all-time · #2118
Karl Sims
Personal blog · karlsims.comscienceai
Karl Sims's personal blog at karlsims.com covers science and ai. Since 2009, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Evolved Virtual Creatures”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Evolved Virtual Creatures4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-07-12
- Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-10-11
- Reaction Diffusion Tool4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-09-29
- /genetic-images.html3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-01-25
- /rd.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-14
- Karl Sims: Artifical Evolution for Computer Graphics3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-01-07
- /papers/siggraph94.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-12-25
- How to make a 3 pendulum harmonograph2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-08
- Reaction-Diffusion Tool2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-29
- /genetic-images.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-25
What Hacker News says?
I'll echo a lot of the praise about the format of this post. It was fun clicking and watching the figures animate as I changed parameters. I was sad that the author missed a number of chances to get into more detail about the classic reaction-diffusion problem [1]. I was reminded of a small project I did which produced similar animations, though with periodic boundary conditions, for learning about the Gray-Scott mo…
Comment linking /rd.html
on “Going Critical”Submitted Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994) as a story · 71 points
HN discussionOn the other hand this site also teaches the internet that eventually everything becomes a reaction-diffusion system/phase separating fluids [1]. [1]: https://www.karlsims.com/rd.html
Comment linking /rd.html
on “Each visit to the page deteriorates the main image”Submitted Evolved Virtual Creatures as a story · 23 points
HN discussionThere are a couple of most plausibly hard steps: the origin of life up to just before bacteria split from archaea, and the origin of eukaryotes, which happened just once after something like 2 billion years. But I had in mind something cheaper more like scaling up the idea of http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html . Intelligence has evolved in animals as unrelated as octopi and us.
Comment linking /evolved-virtual-creatures.html
on “Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning”Submitted Reaction-Diffusion Tutorial (2013) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionMandelbrot and Julia sets are related: https://www.karlsims.com/julia.html
Comment linking /julia.html
on “How Mandelbrot set images are affected by floating point precision”Submitted Reaction Diffusion Tool as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI remember being dumbstruck after watching that video for the first time and realizing the power of programming. Karl Sims website still looks a bit like it did back then http://www.karlsims.com
Comment linking /
on “Bizarre Soft Robots Evolve to Run”Submitted How to Make a Three-Pendulum Rotary Harmonograph as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd he did it in 1994 : http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html There was also earlier work, e.g. Witkin and Kass, Spacetime Constraints, 1988, but I don't think I've ever seen a video.
Comment linking /evolved-virtual-creatures.html
on “Bizarre Soft Robots Evolve to Run”Submitted Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you haven’t run across it yet, Karl Sims’ virtual creatures are also really fascinating. https://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html And anything by Melanie Mitchell. Her book “An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms” is great.
Comment linking /evolved-virtual-creatures.html
on “SproutLife – Evolving version of Conway’s Game of Life”Submitted Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is one of those ones I’ll stop and read every time it gets posted. Bit of trivia: in the novel, “Jurassic Park”, the park’s supercomputer is a Cray, but Spielberg picked a Connection Machine for the movie because he thought it looked cooler. Also, the artist Karl Sims did some outstanding work using the Connection Machine that was mind blowing for the time, and still pretty darn cool today. The computer itself…
Comment linking /genetic-images.html
on “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)”Submitted Reaction Diffusion as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI was wondering if there was any work in the field of evolving 'creatures' moving in a virtual space, beyond what Karl Sims did 23 years ago. https://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html https://www.karlsims.com/galapagos/index.html It would be nice if Karl Sims could open source it as it is really inspiring visual example in the field of Artificial Life, next to seeing the generations of metuselahs unfol…
Comment linking /galapagos/index.html
on “Formal Systems in Biology”Submitted How to Make a Three-Pendulum Rotary Harmonograph as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOverall the idea is about 20 years old. The earliest reference I can think of is Karl Simms work. It's pretty impressive considering how old it is: http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
Comment linking /evolved-virtual-creatures.html
on “Genetic Algorithms for Training Deep Neural Networks for Reinforcement Learning”Submitted RDTool, A reaction diffusion toy (2022) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI hadn't before, thanks for the tip! It's been a while since I played with this stuff, but I might have to get a copy and explore. I have heard of MetaSynth in audio circles. I'm not sure, but the images and videos on the ArtMatic site look (to me) very inspired and influenced by the work of Karl Sims, which is the main source of inspiration behind my project... http://www.karlsims.com/papers/siggraph91.html You can…
Comment linking /papers/siggraph91.html
on “Self-Replicating Functions”Submitted Reaction-Diffusion Tool as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe Connection Machine had some cool art and animation usage. Karl Sims developed an art installation using algorithms to evolve images based on user selections. It was to see for example in Paris at the Centre Pompidou. As you can see on his page, the installation used a bunch of color graphics screens, a Connection Machine (2^15 processors). You can see the machine on the top image on the right. The actual softwar…
Comment linking /genetic-images.html
on “The Connection Machine (1985) [pdf]”Submitted Karl Sims as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHi, TL;DR Usually in reinforcement learning, the body designs of robot agents are fixed. Here, the agent can learn a task, and also learn a better design of its body at the same time. Link to the blog article: https://designrl.github.io/ (There is a blooper section at the very bottom of the article so check it out!) There's also some active discussion about this article on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/statu…
Comment linking /evolved-virtual-creatures.html
on “Reinforcement Learning for Improving Agent Design”Submitted Karl Sims – Liquid Selves (1992) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs a teenager, I had the opportunity to play and experience the monumental installation Genetic Images by Karl Sims installed at Pompidou Center in 1993. It was using a Connection Machine to render images in realtime: http://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html The photo at the top of the page is of the installation at Pompidou Center (in the space that is now the staff entrance.) Genetic Images has only been instal…
Comment linking /genetic-images.html
on “The Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (2015)”Submitted RD Tool: Explore emergent shapes/patterns with reaction-diffusion simulations as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhow far we've come since https://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html quite a bit, but surprisingly not
Comment linking /genetic-images.html
on “Show HN: I made a Pinterest clone using SigLIP image embeddings”Submitted Reaction-Diffusion Explorer Tool as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
