Offspring is a lovely abstract visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony:
"Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it's reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.
Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. (…) Robots can only mate with robots near them in both space in age. To encourage dissimilar permutations, robots are not allowed to mate with siblings."
BoingBoing reader Skye Ashbrook says, "They even give you the source code to each process. I'd love to take those and build small apps on my system to render really high-res versions to output to nice paper on an IRIS printer or something. They can't handle much traffic so if the link is fUXXored, please please keep trying back — it is so worth it." Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Prion adds, "I was marveling at the mating robots and had in my mind that the work was similar to the magic found at levitated.net. Looking at the credits in the source code I discovered that flash master j.tarbell was the author, one of the levitated.net contributors. For glorious nonlinear flash animation, visit the site."
Update 2: BoingBoing reader David says, "The code for the robot pair-bonding is written using Processing, a Java-based language and environment. It's a fun system, with instant gratification."
And BoingBoing reader Darren says, "When i saw this i was reminded of a current exhibition on in the modern art museum kiasma. its by a scottish artist charles sandison. he used something similar in that he had words "food" "man "woman" "child" "mother" "father" "old" and they all interacted with each other. the "man" would go to get "food" the children and mothers and woman would stay huddled together in the "village" area. groups of men would go and fight each other now and then. fascinating stuff. More info about the artist here. "living rooms" is the name of the exhibtion in kiasma.
