Research

OK so today we've continued working on the programming and our goal is to create a prototype random organism generator. This will let us know if our code for the organisms DNA is actually working, and creating our organism. Actually thats more or less our goal for the week I've been reading the book "Biomedia" by Eugene Thacker as a suggestion from Amanda. We've spent some time playing with other similar games and simulations. I really enjoyed the "Evolites," and left it running on my computer for a few days altering the settings and seeing what happened. Eventually the game became so huge my computer crashed being unable to process the giant organisms I had "created." Also my niece allowed me to experience "Webkinz," which is essentially a virtual pet world much like "Neopets," which I remember growing up with (I can surprisingly still get on my old account! So can Cory, I feel like a nerd), and the Facebook application "FluffFriends." Basically you adopt a creature and play games to earn points or money to spend on food, clothing, and accessories for your creature. I've also been thinking about Pokemon, or at least the latter versions of the video game, when it was no longer "cool," which allowed the player to mate his monsters to create different monsters which were inaccessible otherwise. Cory says I need to mention "Dragon Warrior Monsters," in which it was necessary to mate your monsters to advance in the game and earn more powerful and rare monsters. It is available on the Nintendo DS as "Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker."

I also stumbled on this amazing site similar to "Second Life," a MMO community, called "Metaplace." (You can read the news article here). It has JUST come out and is still in the testing phase which means we won't be able to play it for some time, but I can't wait to see what it's all about. The basic idea is a world where you can create absolutly anything, it is based off of the book "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson which we were supposed to read in the Integrated Media Elective I took last year in the Spring. We've also added some links on the side to other interesting blogs about science and technology, as well as a video about Programming DNA which we HIGHLY recommend watching.

Knut has been showing us some interesting Bacteria games, one of which is John Conway's Game of life. Another one we found is here. The name of it is litterally just "Bacteria."

OK, OK back to work then, we'll let you know when we get something actually working :]