Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN brings it up as a classic example of evolutionary algorithms, including how the creatures exploited physics-simulation bugs, which parallels metric gaming in AI.
What it is
A restored 1994 video of Karl Sims' research on evolved virtual creatures, where simulated block creatures are bred through artificial evolution to swim, walk, follow and compete. It is a landmark demonstration of genetic algorithms in physics simulation.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites owenpalmer · 2024-07 · on “A simple procedural animation technique [video]”
Beautiful video. I would love to see this animation technique combined with an evolution simulation similar to Karl Sims' Evolved Virtual Creatures project: [this video] Previous HN discussion: [LINK]
Cites dahart · 2024-12 · on “AIs Will Increasingly Fake Alignment”
The discussion reminds me of Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures. In the Siggraph talk he mentioned that they would absolutely exploit any bugs in the physics simulation that they could. That’s all that’s happening with this article’s LLMs - the metric is dictator, and simply and predictably leads to any and all possible behaviors that achieve higher scores. [this video] You know what’s really weird though? In a very long and detailed and thoughtful post about how AIs are behaving in surprising ways and doing something other than what they “say”, it is non-stop anthropomorphizing the AI in practically every sentence. The number of silly statements about what Claude “thinks”, or that it “fights”,
Cites pixelpoet · 2025-03 · on “Everything is Ghibli”
What was shown in the video seems to be something like Karl Sims' work[0], which is completely different (genetic algorithm for optimising black-box locomotion within a physics simulation framework) from AI image generation / what we're currently calling "Ghiblification". [0] [this video]