A Bit of Light Reading from Stephen Grand
In the months leading up to the release of Creatures 1 and the subsequent years, there were a number of published articles which revolved around the game. As that time period was nearly fifteen years ago, I assumed that the written work would be impossible to come by. However, while leafing through my copy of Creatures: Official Strategies & Secrets by Toby Simpson, I stumbled across the following paragraph on the final pages:
“We recommend you read the paper Creatures: Artificial Life Autonomous Software Agents for Home Entertainment by S. Grand, D. Cliff, and A. Malhotra. This paper was presented at Agents 97, and is available from the CyberLife web site… It contains a more detailed breakdown of how the brain model in Creatures works.”
The URL listed was long gone, but I had some hope! Finding the title of an article was an excellent start. It took only a few moments to locate the article at CiteSeerX! A PDF version can be downloaded via the small icon on the right side of the screen. Even better, there are two other papers found in a search for Stephen Grand!
Creatures: Artificial Life Autonomous Software Agents for Home Entertainment is a fairly brief article, but it is packed with an enormous amount of information about Creatures. Granted, some sections include many scientific words that require some extra research to understand. Yet, on the whole, the descriptions of the brain model and biochemistry made a lot of sense to my nonscientific mind! There were also a few interesting tidbits, including a couple of shortcomings and opportunities. I was highly impressed about the ways in which learning in Norns was described. Suddenly, a lot of the sections of the Creatures 1 Genetics Kit didn’t seem so foreign!
I highly recommend downloading the article, if only to keep it on hand for a rainy day. I have yet to fully read the other two articles, although Creatures: Entertainment Software Agents with Artificial Life appears to be a more fleshed out version of the aforementioned article. Still, I was very excited to stumble across these Creatures articles! I wonder if there are more out there…
Update: Here are a couple of additional resources from Steve Grand regarding Creatures and artificial life.
- Agents from Albia (Thanks to Malkin for the title!)
- Bubbles in Cyberspace: A Cellular Approach to Virtual Environments and Intelligent Synthetic Life Forms
- Creation: Life and How to Make It (Thanks to ArchDragon! Excerpt available online, or at Amazon to purchase.)
- Creatures: An Excercise in Creation
- Effing the Ineffable: An Engineering Approach to Consciousness
- The Emergence of Personality: How to Create Souls from Cells (Partial chapter available online.)
There was an article in the 9th of May 1998 issue of New Scientist called Agents from Albia, it came with the most amazing diagram of the inner workings of a norn’s physiology.
Thanks, Malkin! Agents from Albia can be found online, courtesy of Wayback Machine. The graphic is a separate link, but it works! This should be quite interesting to read and look at!
i think the man himself will have them and he normally answers people on his blog when he isn’t creating grandroids
There’s a couple of articles out there for Creatures, some even by Steve himself. I don’t think I’ve stumbled upon all of these ones, so I’m rather excited!
If anyone is looking for a good Creatures related read though, I’d highly recommend getting “Creation: Life and how to make it” by Steve. Obviously in book form it’ll cost you, but to date it’s still the best Creatures read I’ve had. You can get it off Amazon, which makes it relatively easy to come by.
Now I’m off to download these articles!
I’ve updated the main post with a few additional links, both suggested and found otherwise.
Lilliumbird: I might ask him for any additional articles that might be missing from my list. It would be a shame to overlook any: Steve Grand has a lot to offer Creatures fans, as well as those generally interested in artificial life!
ArchDragon: Thanks for the title! I found an online excerpt, which is linked above, but I do believe I’ll need to order a copy for myself. I’m happy to see it’s still in print at Amazon, and at a pretty reasonable price!
At one point Steve Grand had put up several historical documents on his website:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070830125111/http://fp.cyberlifersrch.plus.com/creaturesarchive/creatures_history.htm
Another good one, a book that inspired Steve Grand in some respects, is The Planiverse by A.K. Dewdney:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2005-06/planiverse/index.html (fansite)
There’s a 2003 book called “Digital Desires: Language, Identity and New Technologies” which contains a chapter called “Get ALife: Cyberfeminism and the politics of artificial life” by Sarah Kember which briefly discusses Creatures.
Steve was interviewed by Salon.com in 2002:
http://www.salon.com/2002/01/02/grand/
Something more recent from Steve Grand, a book chapter:
“Playing God: The Historical Motivations of Artificial Life : A Fresh, Interdisciplinary Look at How Design Emerges in Complex Systems, Especially Life”
“Just as artificial intelligence comes in several philosophically distinct flavors—for instance, Strong versus Weak—the discipline of artificial life can encompass a number of things, from the pragmatic use of computer simulation to explore principles of biological self-organization to meaning exactly what it says: artificial life. This chapter describes some of the factors that have motivated attempts to replicate living or lifelike processes and discusses the interplay between “design” and “emergence.””
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-007-4156-0_40?LI=true
Thanks for the links, Malkin! It’s good to see that Steve Grand is still publishing artificial life articles and chapters.
This is by Eric Goodwin, in 1999 – it touches on Creatures, but it’s essentially about a ‘cousin’ AL system to Creatures.
“How a Biochemical Metabolic Model can Contribute to Intelligent Lifelike Behaviour”
http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/1999/SS-99-02/SS99-02-011.pdf
Here’s an interview with Steve Grand by New Scientist, published in April 2000: God of the norns.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000510042647/http://www.newscientist.com/nl/0401/stephengrand.html