i:DAT 204 | Organism Project

organism n. 1. any living animal or plant including any bacterium or virus. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations
2. anything resembling a living creature in structure, behavior, etc —-, organ’ismal or,organ’ismic adj. organ’ismally adv.

The Project Outline :

A: to generate a problem which is not technology driven, i.e. the idea drives the project. You should not start working on the computer until the ‘life form’ spec is generated. You will then have to find ways of realising it with appropriate software or platforms.

B: to force you to consider a truly time based, multidimensional, interactive problem. In principle a life form needs to feed or to be fed, sleep, move, multiply, expel waste etc. It will be sensitive to certain conditions and have a life expectancy. Do not use buttons, instead concentrate on a process of interactions and behaviours. In defining a life form do not fall into the obvious trap of using cartoon characters, question existing models, redefine and innovate! What is digital life? What is Oops?

First Batch of Ideas:

First of all, I have been thinking about whether I should approach this project responsibly or irresponsibly in its design, although I took a while to decide I have opted to go down the irresponsible route of design with some kind of viral Organism / Life form, this organism does not have to be deadly to its host it could just be an annoyance or irritation to the system.

Idea 1 – A Moody Organism:

The ‘Moody’ Organism would basically be some kind of digital bacteria id say, and that if left to its own devices there is nothing to stop it from being happy, therefore rendered harmless, but, on  the other hand if it decides it is being to neglected the bacteria could act out upon its host or against other things e.g Web pages. I wouldn’t engineer this organism originally hostile, I would just allow for variable change in it’s ‘personality’ so it has the opportunity to if it so pleases.

Idea 2 – Self Learning Organism?

This idea is around the idea of the organism becoming self sufficient, after a brief period at the start where it relies on some small bits of data (The ‘food’) which are supplied by the user, whether this be by tricking a user into ‘feeding’ it or its creator intentionally helping its development. An example of this idea would be;

Once created the Organism is hosted in a live web page which we will call its home, this web page could be manufactured so that random visitors that click on something they want will actually end up feeding the organism. It could be fed by logging the URL/IP that they have come from to this website and then using a part of this previous URL/IP and ‘feeding’ on it. Once fed it can take a liking to this and then ‘feed’ on other URL/IP’S that are similar i.e containing some of the same numbers.

Once the Organism/Life Form has eaten enough for example the creator could give it a set number of things to eat before it develops (Evolves) and becomes in a sense more power full than before and instead of just ‘eating’ a small piece of the visitors IP it can now select a lot more numbers from it and get bigger and bigger.

Creating a 2Dimensional Cellular Automata

I am going to create a 2dimensional Cellular Automata in Action-script.

An example that is visually similar to what i want to create would be:

http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/flash/actionscript-3/2d-cellular-automata/

New Event: Partnered with Nick Marshall:

Extension on original solo idea:

How it will work:

The revamp idea is that we create an organism with set parameters in which it lives and evolves. In order to survive the organism needs a source of food and water, in this case represented by data in the form of I.P addresses and possibly URL’s. It also needs an environment in which to live, in this case a box hosted on a live website. Consider this a digital petri dish.

The idea behind this is that the organism feeds off visitor’s I.P addresses and uses the numbers obtained to evolve. We initially considered using URL’s aswell but we need to double check we can do this.

The organism grows in the box as the day goes by dependant on visitors to feed it to sustain its growth. The bigger it gets the more hits it needs to continue growing. If it doesnt eat the number of I.P addresses it needs in one day, it will start to digress and eventually die if not fed.

We want to give this organism a personality too, the way in which we hope to percieve personality and character within this organism is through colour. Colour and mood have a great link to personality, which will give it a more dynamic motive. A good example of colour being used as a metaphor for a mood are mood rings.

The Organism Life Cycle:

As this is an organism in a “digital context” it needs to obey the simple rules of life:

• It has to have a start point
• it has to grow
• it ‘can’ reproduce
• it has to die

All of these key points in the life cycle can be influenced by external actions. How much you feed it, how happy it is etc… These influences can be in the form of changing the time period of the organism’s life cycle or skipping certain stages. An example would be … it becomes to depressed to reproduce, it doesnt get to grow because it doesnt get fed and subsequently dies etc…

Passage from Nicks Blog: http://livenickmarshall.wordpress.com

I.P Addresses:

What exactly is an I.P?

Wikipedia defines an I.P as:

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical identification (logical address) that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes.^[1] Although IP addresses are stored as binary numbers, they are usually displayed in human-readable notations, such as 192.168.100.1 (for IPv4), and 2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:1:1 (for IPv6). The role of the IP address has been characterized as follows: “A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.” ^[2]

This should help fuel ideas for a name for the organism.

Passage from Nicks Blog: http://livenickmarshall.wordpress.com

Another Change of Idea!:

The new idea me and nick have thought out is to replace the start and randomise buttons that we were originally thinking of having on the environment, with a search bar and submit button.

This search bar will have content typed into it and on submission will search for the relevant keyword and obtain URLS which will then be stored into an array. There is also going to be a timer on the organism much like that of a body clock that will decide on whether it needs to eat or not, probably something in the region of a 10minuite time bracket, if it has not eaten it will and if it has it wont…

If the organism does need to eat then it will dive into this array and pick out a random URL generated from the previous search data. If for example it picks out “www.google.com” then it will grow outward on a X and Y axis 7 cells/pixels. It will grow out 7 because the URL “www.google.com” has a total of 14 characters and we split this number equally to give instruction to the axis. This whole idea of the organism eating when its hungry gives it almost self sufficiency.

States:

The organism will have two states; Happy and Un-Happy

It will be happy when:

• It eats regularly.

• Eats a large amount of characters.

It will be unhappy when:

• It is hungry (when not fed enough its appetite decreases, resulting in death.

• Low number of characters within array