Keyboard Evolution

[mundens]

People reading this are probably familiar with the demonstration of evolution in clocks. The other night I was listening to some keyboard music (the piece from the end credits of Rah Xephon), and became fascinated with the way keyboards have evolved. I have also finished reading Permutation City by Greg Egan. I say that because it's "Autoverse" may

Comments

[ferrouswheel]

Cool video! reminds me of my experiments trying to create jumping organisms in a simulated physics environment and inadvertently discovered Tensegrity structures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity (I only just recently found out there was a word for them!)

They use evolution simulation to design ICs already. The AI work I'm doing has a number of evolutionary inspired processes in it too - although these are optimised alot using probabilistic methods because we really don't want thought to be as slow as evolution.

As long as you can somehow represent a fitness function and system constraints, you can evolve new designs. Keyboard fitness could be based on the number of semitones played and how close they are to perfect pitch. The difficult decision is working out what the building blocks are... too many and too much freedom and evolution will take forever on a computer and not enough and you'll likely get somewhat boring results.

[exiledinpn]

The important thing to remember with Permutation City is that the people involved are mad. Mad as hatters. Mad mad mad. And the whole idea I think grew out of a story in Axiomatic ("The Walk", I think it is called).