This is the Google Summer of Code blog for Devin Chalmers, constructing a cross-platform Artificial Life framework named CocoaBugs.
August 14, 2008 9:01 PM
Well, the Summer of Code is winding down, and I'm going to be spending the next few days whipping up a wiki and a code repository. I just want to make one more quick change before it all comes crashing...August 12, 2008 10:32 PM
In order to make the headless CocoaBugs actually useful for most models, we want the ability to set a range of random values for a simulation to assume. Then, researchers can build a model, decide on a range of values...August 9, 2008 10:53 AM
The ALife conference was amazing. Our research, though there is still a world of work to do, was very well-received by the audience, and we have many new ideas for directions to take it in. (As if we didn't have...July 27, 2008 10:19 PM
Alright, so, I haven't done much the past few days, and won't be doing much for at least a week. A few colleagues and I are scrambling to prepare our presentation at ALife XI in Winchester, UK (leaving on Friday),...July 23, 2008 1:47 PM
...is a good name for a rock band. Last time, we saw how to create nice friendly configuration files for CocoaBugs. Today, I'll be talking about how to use those config files to run ALife simulations headlessly in a new...July 21, 2008 9:19 AM
Sorry about no posts for a while--I'm so bad about that. I've been super-swamped the past few weeks helping out a Portland company with their iPhone app. Rest assured that I am on track. I'll post tomorrow about some first...July 13, 2008 12:18 PM
Previously, we saw how we could build a framework GUI to translate the configuration options for a given ALife model into a configuration window that could provide an NSDictionary of key-value pairs to give to our ALife models. That was...July 12, 2008 5:10 PM
So, we've got plugins, but we don't have any way to actually run them yet. For that, we need a GUI. Implementing all this in a relatively sane way required a fair amount of work and classes, so I won't...July 8, 2008 4:51 PM
In the last post, I intimated that moving our models out into their own plugins was going to be really, really easy. It turns out that that's absolutely true! How nice. We already had several models, loosely coupled with the...July 4, 2008 11:19 AM
The last few posts have gone into detail on some techniques to reduce the coupling between different parts of the CocoaBugs framework. Specifically, we want to move towards a plugin-based solution for running different ALife models. Plists and key-value observation...July 2, 2008 7:04 PM
Cocoa gets a little too helpful with missing methods...?June 30, 2008 1:43 PM
In the last entry we talked about one way to abstract away the differences between ALife models (specifically, differences in relevant statistics) by connecting classes with key-value observation. However, the solution was a little constricting and nonextensible. Let's leverage the RAW POWER OF XML to make our job a little easier...June 24, 2008 9:07 PM
CocoaBugs aims to provide a framework for user interface, statistics gathering, and generation of configuration files for headless operation on cluster nodes for a variety of artificial life models. Facilitating all of these options requires intimate knowledge of the models which will be, one hopes, written for CocoaBugs in the future; managing this sort of knowledge in a flexible, scalable way is a significant challenge...June 18, 2008 4:00 PM
Time to hunker down on the bugs...May 22, 2008 6:40 PM
This is my summer of code blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.