Laurent Kermel portfolio

BEAGLE

Atari ST/Macintosh - 1995

Back in 1995, Beagle was a logical progression in my work. I spent most of my youth writing video games (see my Atari ST for more information) - but these games had the same 'problem'. As a designer, I had a hard time playing them because I knew what was waiting for me at every corner. Games like Wiliness or Bold were fun to make, but I couldn't really enjoy them as a player. So I started doing a lot of experimentation with randomly generated games (such as Malstorm and the editor World'ed), and these ideas slowly led to artificial life and artificial behaviors. Beagle was at the core of my Fine Art diploma thesis in 1996, which I passed with distinctions.

In 2014, I decided to revive and adapt some old ideas from Beagle, and turned them into a video game called Nektonik.

Beagle was a program that generated simple and basic "organisms" and would let them live and evolve following basic evolution rules. The main goal of the project was to create emergent complexity from simple anisotropic building blocks. From simple cells, the system could generate countless organisms, all able to interact with the world they lived in and with each other.

I would let the system run over a few days, and see what would emerge from it - some organisms would go extinct whereas other species would thrive, multiply, evolve and take over the system. Some would adapt and move around with surprising efficiency, flock together, become fierce predators or parasite other organisms. For the first time I was really surprised by one of my games.

Sadly, the Atari ST was the only tool I had and it was starting to be really dated back in 1995. The representation on screen wasn't exactly what I was looking for... the organisms were just schematics circles and lines designed to give me enough information to understand what was going on. Actually I don't even know if all the "mutation" and "evolution" algorithms worked because the Atari ST didn't have enough memory to run the necessary iterations.

For that matter, I later used an Apple Macintosh and Strata Studio PRO to build these organisms in 3D, as I would have loved to see them, and this by using the data I had collected from the original simulations.

Here are some creatures created in 1995 using this technique: