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In the vast and varied field of artificial life some areas,
such as neural networks and cellular automata, have been thoroughly researched.
Others, though, still await a deeper exploration. This is the case of
what I named BIOTS, which could be defined as individual
agents that move autonomously according to a set of simple rules that
take as input the situation of other biots. A group of biots shows an
emergent collective behavior, more or less unpredictable, and often similar
to phenomena found in nature.
This field was inaugurated in 1987 by the seminal work of Craig W. Reynolds
(see his website, www.red3d.com/cwr/boids
), who developed a kind of agents, which he called ‘Boids’,
that simulate the movement of birds flying in a flock, according to three
simple rules. Since then, many improvements and variations of this idea
have been conducted but, to my knowledge, there has been no systematic
attempt to unfold all its possibilities. We could say, though, that biots
‘come naturally’ in nowadays widespread object-oriented programming.
This calls for some generalization and definition of principles regarding
this agents.
Biots are a generalization of boids, not limited to flocking and natural-resembling
behaviors, but extended to all kinds of relational movement rules, some
of which look more like physical than biological systems, or like none
at all. My first steps into this land have showed me a very broad horizon
of possibilities to survey. My proposal is to undertake this exploration.
It would take the final form of a web site, containing the following:
- A virtual zoo of biots.
- An immersion into their aesthetic possibilities for
art and design.
- The code, in the form of open source files, as a data
bank for all programmers interested in the subject.
I would also attempt to establish some criteria of classification
as a way to offer a taxonomy of biots and giving ground to some theoretical
work about them.
This simple creatures put in action a set of concepts that are relevant
for science, art, and society in general: Autonomy, interaction, emergent
behavior, self-organization, decentralization. They are both a metaphor
and an application of matters that involves us all: how a multiplicity
of individuals can get together? How many ways are there of being a ‘group’?
What sort of being is this ‘one’ made of ‘many’?
Biots are native citizens of the unfolding paradigm shift that can be
gathered around the idea of ‘complex systems’. Maybe their
movement can lead us into some yet uncharted lands of this challenging
new world.
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