Work in progress
This program is yet to be written - but here's a rough early draft of the pattern generator, from Stephen.
This shows the kind of patterns that Stephen is getting from a Cellular Automata, designed to make spots and stripes. This is very early days and Sarah is going to be working with Stephen on communicating the thinking behind this so it can be built up into an entertaining and meaningful game for non-specialists. The order of events is likely to be as follows:
- Where does your animal live? (pick your habitat e.g. savanah, bush - this affects the cartoon backdrop on the screen - your cartoon animal will move in front of this)
- Pick yourself an animal. Users pick out an cartoon animal silhouette that stands out very clearly on the backdrop. This animal moves around the backdrop, showing up very clearly.
- Now we're going to evolve some camouflage. We don't need to make the whole pattern, just a simple set of rules for generating it. [THIS IS ABOUT CAs - link this to a story about genes vs gene expression and packing information in the genome]. The programme evolves camouflage for the cartoon animal (i.e. it evolves a pattern that makes the animal blend into the backdrop as it moves around).
- Do you want to judge these camouflages or get the computer do it? Users can opt to do a human fitness assessment but will find this makes the process very slow. They can opt to go return to an automatic fitness assessment at any time.
- At any point, users can stop the process, view the 'fittest' camouflage to date and see how well it's working by moving the cartoon animal around the screen.
Stephen's starting point: a cellular automata with randomly created rules (this will be our pattern generator). Click on any square to change its colour and generate a new image. Press W as often as you like to randomly alter the weights. Press N to randomly change the starting colour of the squares. Some patterns oscillate, some are completely black or white but a few settle on an interesting black-and-white pattern. It's these patterns that we'll be judging for their camouflage potential.