http://beta.mylotro.eu/images/test.swf

Teaching himself to stand up.

The physics are completely borked, mind you.

Oh, not to mention that it's running in real time instead of speeded up, so it'll take around a week/month(??) to get him standing up properly. PLUS, he's not being dropped in various poses, so it's not REALLY him getting to stand up.

So, it's bollocks really. But we're still developing it ;)

The next steps are:

1) fix the physics
2) give him the ability to actually pick up his upper legs (he currently has no muscles joining his hips to his upper legs).
3) Give the option to speed it up. Currently it's doing one test every 2.5 seconds. We could get this down to about 5-6 tests per second if we're clever. Flash has no real multi threading capabilities, so we're going to attempt to introduce basic threading and allow it to use more than one core.
4) Introduce a test that actually does something. Gotta do things like.. stand him in a position and hit him with a random force and allow him to steady himself. If we keep the force random each time it should give us something actually worthwhile.
5) Actually allow the damn data to be saved. Currently it doesn't! I'm going to make it so that everyone is working together to improve one instance, instead of everyone have their own instances (which restart every time!)

It's an experience trying to get this working :) i'm sure we're making huge mistakes, but I'm sure we'll iron them out as we go along.

Currently with the program I've been running at home for the past 4-5 hours I have a dude that is standing straight (and balanced) the majority of tests run :)

The physics stuff is really frustrating me, though. trying to emulate muscles is a real pain in the bum.

updated slightly with a speed slider ;)

still gotta add loading/saving before it's worth really trying out properly.

What kind of variables do you think each muscle will need to know about to keep it stable?

currently they know about the tension of all the other muscles, and they know the position of the 'torso'.

I'm thinking they'll probably need to know the angle of the other limbs and maybe how much pressure is on the limb, and the center of gravity for the entire skeleton.

hmmmmmm.

(sorry using this thread as a semi blog. makes it easier for me to keep focus!)

Left it running over night..

67 generations so far (929 tiny mutations each generation, so 62243 mutations!) and he's um.. falling over :(

Very very very simple methods at the moment.

- Generate 30 random equations for each limbs movements (possible variables to play with are the tension of all the other muscles), then spawn 30 mutated equations for each of those 30. so you have 900.
- Try every single equation and order them by which held him upright the longest
- Take the top 30 best and mutate them 30 times, so you have 900 again
- Find the best of those
- etc.etc.etc.

It uses various methods for mutation - stuff like swapping chromosomes with others or just altering a value or function to another.

The big problem for me will be the input data, I think. Knowing what variables each of the muscles will need to know about in order to know how much to tense. Currently it only knows the basic stuff.

Congratulations on making a John Cleese silly walks generator.

I love all this software learning program stuff.

You clearly need to skin it as Michael Jackson.

(Not the whisky expert. The other one.)