Creatures

 

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Creatures history

Norns: The First Generation

The first outing for our general technological approach was in the popular computer game Creatures, published in 1996 by Mindscape. These software life forms are still kept as pets by many enthusiasts around the world, and probably still represent the state of the art in artificial life (if you don't count Lucy).

Please note: Creatures is not the property of Cyberlife Research Ltd., although it was conceived, designed and largely programmed by Steve whilst he was working at Millennium Interactive Ltd. and later Creature Labs Ltd. This web site is not concerned with Creatures as a product or a brand, nor connected in any way with Creature Labs (now liquidated) or its successors. Material about Creatures is given here purely in order to show how our past technology works and how it has been used in real products.

"Creatures" and "CyberLife" are now registered trademarks of Gameware Development Ltd. References to the Creatures technology are used under permission granted by the former Creature Labs Ltd.

For more information on the Creatures product range, click here to go to Gameware's web site.

The eponymous creatures in this computer game are called Norns, and the world's population of them at one stage hovered around the five million mark, making them more common than many familiar natural species. Each norn is composed of thousands of tiny simulated biological components, such as neurons, biochemicals, chemoreceptors, chemoemitters and genes. The norns' genes dictate how these components are assembled to make complete organisms, and the creatures' behaviour then emerges from the interactions of those parts, rather than being explicitly 'programmed in'.

The norns are capable of learning about their environment, either by being shown things by their owners or through learning by their own mistakes. They must learn for themselves how to find food and how to interact with the many objects in their environment. They can interact with their owners, using simple language, and also with each other. They can form relationships and produce offspring, which inherit their neural and biochemical structure from their parents and are capable of open-ended evolution over time. They can fall prey to a variety of diseases (as well as genetic defects) and can be treated with appropriate medicines.

One of the most startling things about this product was not the norns themselves but their owners! Approaching a million enthusiasts worldwide have taken these creatures under their wing and many still care for them and study them with great skill. At one stage there were something like four hundred web sites run by Creatures enthusiasts, plus a highly active usenet newsgroup (alt.games.creatures). Specialised web sites included adoption agencies for unwanted or battered norns(!), plus "norn genome project" sites, where users try to unravel the meaning of the creatures' genome. All in all, Creatures became a vast, worldwide scientific experiment in artificial life.

Even though norns were pretty stupid and primitive creatures, they showed the way forward and helped to open people's eyes to the future of organic technology. Since the development of Creatures we have been focusing on research and development of considerably more sophisticated approaches to artificial life and artificial intelligence. Lucy the robot is our primary test bed for this research, although many of the resulting new ideas will eventually make their way into software products.

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Copyright © 2004 Cyberlife Research Ltd.
Last modified: 06/04/04