Wandering Autonoma: Photographers in the Wasteland

I’m very interested in the work of Theo Jansen, the Dutch creator of wind-powered sculptures that can autonomously crawl a beach landscape, without maintenance from humans.

The ANTS (Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm) project is working on structures that “harnesses the effective skeletal/muscular system of the frame itself to enable amoeboid movement” which is something like mobile buildings.

I think of wandering autonoma losing itself in a desert or wasteland, wandering unnoticed into a pond and never being seen again, perhaps still traversing it’s continent after the extinction of life.

In the “Physicists of the Wasteland” article, I wrote about wandering, and its importance in ancient philosophy. Wandering sculptures however, hardly have any sort of intent, and are only shaped by their environment in the physical sense.

I’ve always been interested in AI wanderers of virtual worlds. Despite the designer’s intent to make them appear as fellow travelers, they are obediant to a rather simplistic AI code. In Oblivion, the “Adventurers” can be found randomly around ruins, or inside dungeons. What distinguishes them from enemies, allies, or other NPCs, is that they are meant to have the same role as you. They are exploring, not anchored to a set routine like the other Oblivion NPCS (which stay in their shops five days a week, always take their walks at the same times, and go watch the gladiators at the arena every Sunday.) The eat, sleep, and explore.

Uncle Leo wanders the Fallout wasteland, (dispensing a Zen koan to those who find him twice) or at least it appears like he wanders. I’ve never come across him personally, only read about him. I’m not sure how the coding works, whether the code knows where he is wandering at all times, or if it just occasionally teleports him near you. I suppose that if you follow him you could study his paths, and try to figure out he moves randomly or with intent. But because he can be found at random locations in the wasteland, there is at least the illusion that he wanders. As fascinating as the idea of wandering, persistent bots is, I wonder how we can develop the concept further.

Alexander Trevi at Pruned wondered the same thing about Theo Jansen’s sculptures:

“And you could release these creatures in the arid, wind-swept open spaces of Antarctica as well. Wait a decade or so until its ice caps have melted away, and watch them scamper about over newly revealed soil. With pollens, seeds and alien microbes gestating inside their skeletal yellow plastic tubes, they’ll plant new orchards and forests, maybe a farm or two, like an army of robotic Johnny Appleseeds

 

Or how about dropping them over Chernobyl and future sites of nuclear devastation? Using the ample ambient radiation as their power source, they’ll proceed to deposit phytoremediating flora and fauna. The primary emergency response to apocalyptic disasters.

 

Or let’s send them to Mars or Titan or some extrasolar planet. A new breed of intergalactic planetary landscape architect capable of exploration and/or terraforming: fast, cheap, and out of control.”

I wondered about bots exploring and mapping a vast procedurally generated universe, (where space has not actually been designed until it is observed), in search of something.  In search of resources that are essential to the game perhaps, thus solving the problem of having to artificially insert resources near the player and as a result breaking the integrity of the virtual world; instead, sending out thousands of bots to seek out resources or important game elements and then reporting back to the player so that he or she knows exactly where to go.

It could be a kind of indexer, like this custom Roomba that not only vacuums your room, but catalogues your belongings.

What about in bots exploring a virtual world in search of aesthetic form? In other words, photographer bots.

When Unreal Tournament came out, I was impressed by all of the AI sliders that the player could use to customize his opponents. Since then, I have hoped that developers would find ways to give fps bots even more of a personality. I imagined a sort of Battle Royale, where one player is left on an island or in a section of an abandoned city with some 20 or so bots for a last man standing mode; each bot or player having only one life.

The map is expansive enough that bots with camping personalities can hide, set traps, etc, while other bots or hunting, or merely wandering aimlessly like the “Clyde” pacman ghost.

What if the player and each bot had a cell phone, which they could use to temporarily team up against a player or bot with an impressive kill streak going on, or to receive information updates from some Takeshi Kitano watching by satellite? Now add a camera to the phone, and allow the bots to text pictures of their kills to everyone else in the game, as a form of taunting. It definitely would beat most standard fps taunts.

From here, I started to think of bots that can take pictures and transmit them to the players. Bots that are exploring infinite procedurally generated universes could in search of something more than resources; they could be in search of aesthetic form. A “good composition detection” program would analyze the world around them and choose the highest rated views for photographs. The photographs could then plaster the billboards and newspapers that are scattered around the virtual world, or simply email them to the player like the postcard gnomes in Amelie.

Like Theo Jansen’s wind-sculptures, or the possibility of amoeboid structures left on the moon by astronauts, bots in virtual worlds might continue to wander unobserved by people for an indefinite period of time. A bot that wanders the remote desert of an online game, a google spider that roams the dead pages of Geocities-like wasteland, perhaps bots programs that continue to explore an online world on p2p servers, long after the last human player has quit. On a p2p network, the bots would be the only thing keeping the virtual dream alive.

(a side tangent to finish things off)

The opposite of the persistent bot concept would be the persistent death of bots. Fallout and Oblivion have something like this; you can nearly make the world extinct bots, aside from guards/security and random encounters. What if for ever pedestrian that dies in GTA, the population reduces by .0000001. If there is an average of 20 pedestrians on screen at any one time, it might take about 500,000 kills to effect the population of Liberty City so much that it only averages 19 pedestrians on the screen. Even the most sociopathic of GTA players would not notice the change. We could play for decades without knowing the decrease in population.

Or perhaps, all pedestrian murders around the world would combine to effect everyone’s game, sort of like the length of Girl in Noby Noby Boy. Probably the most interesting thing would be that players would still hungrily rush towards completion of the task, racking up the kill counts, even if they knew that it meant the permanent death of the city and the game.

Written by Ben Garratt.  Email comments on this article to benjamin.garratt@gmail.com