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WebAL comes of age: a review of the first 21 years of artificial life on the web
Taylor T., Auerbach J., Bongard J., Clune J., Hickinbotham S., Ofria C., Oka M., Risi S., Stanley K., Yosinski J. Artificial Life22 (3):364-407,2016.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Mar 21 2017

Soon after computers became available to researchers, they were used to explore concepts like cellular automata or self-replicating machines and organisms, the most prominent being John H. Conway’s Game of Life. The emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s gave rise to developments that combined the methods used in artificial life (AL) with the web infrastructure. This survey paper on WebAL covers the period from 1994 until 2015, with an emphasis on recent developments.

A lot of the initial projects relied on applets as computational infrastructure, and in some cases were continuations and adaptations of previous work implemented in Java. Two of the prominent examples are Boids applets that evolved from Craig Reynolds’ earlier Java-based versions, and Ariel Dolan’s Floys, featured in a Scientific American article in 2000. Progress in web technology combined with increased processing power led to the development of builder kits and frameworks, allowing users significant freedom to experiment with creatures and environments of their own design. Combined with opportunities to use the web as a data gathering and knowledge organization infrastructure, WebAL also incorporated crowdsourcing and collective intelligence.

The specification and implementation of Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5) in the mid-2000s allowed a transition from technology requiring browser plugins to native implementations, especially in combination with standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) and fast JavaScript engines. A prominent example of this category is EndlessForms, where users can evolve 3D objects, either from existing shapes or from scratch. Such shapes can be converted into real-world objects through 3D printing, and shared with other users, thus leading to a collaborative evolution of shapes.

The paper presents an excellent overview of WebAL, with well-chosen examples to illustrate the methods, technologies, and principles involved. For somebody like me--interested in the field, but not actively involved in related research--it is an excellent opportunity to catch up with influential past projects and more recent developments.

Reviewer:  Franz Kurfess Review #: CR145129 (1706-0397)
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