Abstract About 3.5 billion years ago the first multi-cellular life-forms emerged. Individual cells that once competed directly against one another formed alliances. This allowed cells to specialize creating highly complex mechanisms such as neural networks and muscle fibers. From this point on evolution gave life a phenomenal diversity of designs. Some perform better than others, and thus are allowed to give offspring. This selection process is also known as Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Can we take advantage of this same process to design mechanical forms? After all, nature has been doing so for billions of years and we are living proof of its profound effect: the emergence of properties not suggested by their constituents. The process of evolution have "designed" mechanisms that could swim, hop, camoflage, and sense. It even allowed a regular three pound chunk of matter properties of self-awareness.

This project aims to explore the concepts of artificial evolution in detail, and on a broader scope the concept of emergence.

read more
see gallery
view project


About This is an independent study project at UCLA D|MA by Michael Chang under the supervision of prof. Casey Reas. The entire project was researched and excecuted over a ten week stretch. All programming elements were written and compiled with Processing.