Evolving virtual creatures: 
My research focus on evolution of morphology and behavior of complex creatures in virtual environments. The goal is how the evolution of creatures face with different situations from crawling and walking to more complex activities like climbing and skating. Our creatures use solid 3D blocks and graphtals like Karl Sims's creatures and a new type of controller based on classifier system. Videos of evolving virtual creatures.
Evolving chess strategies:
"Challenge 5. Despite some early misgivings (Selfridge 1956) back when chess playing programs had search trees only two deep (Newell et al. 1958), our modern chess programs completely rely on deep search trees and play chess not at all like humans. Can we build a program that plays chess in the way that a human plays? If we could, then perhaps we could prove how good it was by getting it to play GO--tree search just cannot cut it with GO." Rodney A. Brooks : Challenge Problems for Artificial Intelligence. Classical chess engines exhaustively explore moving possibilities from a chessboard configuration to choose what the next best move to play is. I work on a new method to solve chess without using Brute-Force algorithms. I try to use Genetic Programming to combine elementary chess patterns defined by a chess expert. We apply this method specifically to the classical King-Rook-King endgame. We show that computed strategies are both effective and generic for they manage to win against several opponents (human players and artificial ones such as the chess engine CRAFTY). Besides, the method allows to propose strategies that are clearly readable and useable for a purpose such as teaching chess.  |
