Sex, Circuits and Deep House

Wow, this is incredibly well-executed. I worked in a lab with Bunnie years ago; it's great to see he's still as thoughtful and thorough as he was then. I wish I had the dedication, time and aptitude to execute as well as he does.

A great tidbit:

I designed a very simple protocol which will only reveal if your friends are nearby, and nothing else. Every badge emits a broadcast ping every couple of seconds. Ideally, I’d use an RSSI (receive signal strength indicator) to figure out how far the ping is, but due to a quirk of the radio hardware I was unable to get a reliable RSSI reading. Instead, every badge would listen for the pings, and decrement the ping count at a slightly slower average rate than the ping broadcast. Thus, badges solidly within radio range would run up a ping count, and as people got farther and farther away, the ping count would decrease.

I'd like to commend his propagating better-than-usual understanding of biological trait blending.

At school (in Israel) we learned that you have Dominant Genes and Recessive Genes, and Dominant trumps Recessive. Just a month ago I got to hear a more correct description from a biologist friend, which sounds much like Bunnie's implementation:

In order to capture the wonderful diversity offered by sex, I implement quantitative traits in the light genome. Instead of having a single bit for each trait, it’s a byte, and there’s an expression function that combines the values from each gene (alleles) to derive a final observed trait (phenotype).

By carefully picking expression functions, I can control how the average population looks. Let’s consider saturation (I used an HSV colorspace, instead of RGB, which makes it much easier to create aesthetically pleasing color combinations). A highly saturated color is vivid and bright. A less saturated color appears pastel, until finally it’s washed out and looks just white or gray (a condition analogous to albinism).

If I want albinism to be rare, and bright colors to be common, the expression function could be a saturating add. Thus, even if one allele (copy of the gene) has a low value, the other copy just needs to be a modest value to result in a bright, vivid coloration. Albinism only occurs when both copies have a fairly low value.

Also, Bunnie's blog has a great awesome to noise ratio. Check out his post about a tour in a zipper factory: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364

Edit: text formatting

tldr: Light badges that breed patterns by communicating with each other. Worth skimming the illustrations are great.

"I wanted to make a bit of lighting that my campmates could use to stay safe – and optionally stay classy by offering a range of more subtle lighting effects. I also wanted the light patterns to be individually unique, allowing easy identification in dark, dusty nights. However, diddling with knobs and code isn’t a very social experience, and few people bring laptops to Burning Man. I wanted to come up with a way for people to craft an identity that was inherently social and interactive. In an act of shameless biomimicry, I copied nature’s most popular protocol for creating individuals – sex.

By adding a peer-to-peer radio in each badge, I was able to implement a protocol for the breeding of lighting patterns via sex."

I remember running into the Institute on Esplanade and asking "The Institute of What?". They had all kinds of interesting gadgets on their front lawn. I really love the concept and implementation of this, in particular the careful consideration of proximity detection instead of a chat client. Really lovely way to promote human interaction instead of drawing the user in to interacting with the device itself.

> The new LED pattern replaces the current pattern on the egg donor’s badge

So there are some constraints here that point toward what a version 2 could look like. Under the current paradigm, every child has a unique set of parents - there are no full siblings. And there are no cousins through the egg donor side. Like real sex, there is no way to take an exceptionally fit egg donor and see what the child could look like with different sperm donors - you can do this with Electric Sheep though. Electric Sheep breeds randomly and has an upvote/downvote feedback mechanism, some kind of additional feedback mechanism could be added to these badges to hasten evolution.

It seems like the constraints to the badge are by virtue of it relying on physical hardware of which finite instances are available, whereas Electric Sheep is limited only by much more vast software resources. So maybe the badge creatures have a lifecycle, when they reproduce instead of replacing the egg donor immediately, the child enters a pool waiting to spawn in the next available deceased badge creature?

The idea is amazing. I just wonder if he had also implemented the Chromosomal Crossover in the "sex" function. From his description of the results it seems so, but he hadn't described it and it seems an interesting part to explain.

Amazing work.