introduction

How does Karl Sims's Virtual Creatures evolve

Sims, technically, designed his virtual system by allowing the creatures to perform different behaviors such as swimming, walking, jumping, or competing for virtual resources. 

Different goals were designed for different experiments for various virtual creatures, such as swimming as the fastest in a simulated water environment. Winners completing their tasks most successfully were selected for survival. Then, their virtual genes were selected for the next generation with random gene mutation during reproduction. This process was successive, and creatures that could produce more successful performance appeared.

Karl Sims's Virtual Creatures In History

DIscussion

Before Sims, animation and 3D modeling were almost entirely top-down processes; an artist had to explicitly design and keyframe every movement. Sims showed that it is possible to achieve complex, life-like motion through a bottom-up, goal-oriented process. This is the conceptual ancestor of modern procedural animation found in video games and films, where characters react dynamically to their environment instead of playing pre-baked animations.

While not the first Artificial Life project, it became the most famous and accessible example. It vividly showed that simple rules (physics, genetics, selection) could lead to emergent complexity—sophisticated behaviors and forms that were never explicitly programmed. It made abstract concepts from evolutionary biology tangible. Such a process also resonates with one concept introduced during the course: abstract human language may be interpreted in various ways. Just as the simple genetic "language" in Sims's work was interpreted by the physics engine to produce a vast diversity of unexpected creatures, the abstract instructions of human language can be interpreted by a computer in countless ways, leading to equally surprising and creative results.

Rather than meticulously programming the exact movements and evolutionary trajectories, I'm inspired to simply design the environment and the rules of interaction. The goal is to create a system where surprising and effective solutions can emerge organically, without being explicitly designed.

Individual Conclusion

Karl Sims’s Virtual Creatures shows how simple rules and randomness can produce lifelike motion and diversity. The evolving approach emphasizes process and emergence during indirect interaction, but still produces striking vitality for the audience. It inspires me to let the generative process be influenced not only by human interaction, but also canvas environment for a more natural performance.

reference

Langton, Christopher G., editor. Artificial Life: An Overview. The MIT Press, 1995. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1427.001.0001.

Sims, Karl. “Evolved Virtual Creatures by Karl Sims, 1994.” Karl Sims Home Page, 1994, www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html. 

Sims, Karl. “Evolving Virtual Creatures.” Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques  - SIGGRAPH ’94 [Not Known], 1994, pp. 15–22. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1145/192161.192167.

Sims, Karl. “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition.” Artificial Life, vol. 1, no. 4, July 1994, pp. 353–72. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1162/artl.1994.1.4.353.

Stefan van Dinther. “Karl Sims - Virtual Creatures.” YouTube, YouTube, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmrTNrtE-Lk. 

presentation slides