creating biomorph

Dear All,

I am trying to find a script to build biomorphs in matlab trough the medium of a genetic alghorithm(see Dawkins, 1986). Does anyone have any suggestion?

thank you

[Sven]

As far as I'm aware, the "biomorphs" have not been implemented in MATLAB. There have been other Dawkins' evolutionary MATLAB demonstrations such as "Methinks it is like a weasel" (http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/2061) or a blind watchmaker example (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0).

However, I haven't seen biomorphs make it into MATLAB. A good non-MATLAB implementation is at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/EvolvingCritters.aspx.

[Massimiliano Papera]

Oh thank you for your reply!

I have just looked at that non-MATLAB script. Do you know which program I may use in order to run it? Perhaps MS visual studio 2010?

what do you think?

Thank you.

Answer 1

[Sven]

As far as I'm aware, the "biomorphs" have not been implemented yet in MATLAB. There have been other Dawkins' evolutionary MATLAB demonstrations such as "Methinks it is like a weasel" (<http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/2061>) or a blind watchmaker example (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0)>.

However, I haven't seen biomorphs make it into MATLAB. A good non-MATLAB implementation is at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/EvolvingCritters.aspx. This implementation is in C#. You need to register at the site for source code.

Another implementation (in javascript with jQuery) is at http://codecarnival.com/svg/biomorphs.svg, with source at http://codecarnival.com/js/biomorphs.js.

Another implementation in java is at http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/mirror/biomorph/. I don't think the source code is available.

I think it's high time biomorphs were implemented in MATLAB, so I thoroughly encourage you if you're planning to take on this task :)

[Massimiliano Papera]

Yeah,

actually there is someone who I know for sure but he wont give me the matlab code. Therefore He made exactly the type I need to!!

Cheers

[Sven]

Aww... point him/her to this website and try to convince them that we're not about to do anything commercial with it (I assume you're not!). The idea is already documented by someone else (Dawkins), implementations are already available in other languages elsewhere. There's not much gained from concealing this MATLAB code, and showing it would benefit others as a learning tool. Who knows, maybe the original MATLAB author would get useful feedback/improvements as well. I, for one, would be interested and willing to tinker with it.

[Massimiliano Papera]

I tried already, but he does not reply to my e-mail I do not know what to do.

In the meantime I found this http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~gasser/Software/Biomorph/

what do you think?

the thing is that I do not know python nor java.