About

History

"The virtual creatures competition was started in 2014 by Dan Lessin and Joel Lehman, who were both in Risto Miikkulainen's lab at the time.  Dan was interested in computer graphics, Joel was interested in quality-diversity and open-​endedness, and they shared an affinity for behavioral and morphological complexity in evolutionary robotics.  Thus the competition was crafted to 'showcase evolutionary computation's ability to craft interesting well-adapted creatures with evolved morphologies and controllers'. Joel described their original motivation as 'trying and catalyze and bring recognition to the area of virtual creatures research, which we saw as a very under appreciated field of research,' later noting that 'virtual creatures (or evolutionary robotics with evolvable morphology in general) is one of the rare potential killer apps for evolutionary algorithms' and especially that 'what makes it so interesting (and deserving of much more attention than it has) [is its potential for] open-endedness.' After winning the first two competitions, I took over for Dan as an organizer in 2016.  In 2017, Sebastian Risi joined the team as well, then Sam Kriegman in 2018. In 2019 Joel stepped down from organizing, then in 2021 Sebastian and I did as well, as others cycled in (thanks to the many others who have come after for their service in this regard!) — but I've enjoyed advocating for, and occasionally judging, the event since.  The virtual creatures competition has never been huge in terms of quantity of submissions, but I believe it has — consistently and from the very start — drawn an interesting and diverse set of high-quality entries spanning researchers in evolutionary robotics, artificial life, computer graphics, deep reinforcement learning, independent artists, hobbyists side projects, and more.  The field still has a long way to go, but I think the competition has been a useful and fun waypost (and historic track record) for the field’s progress over the last decade." --- Nick Cheney