Larry Yaeger's Home Page

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This is the place for information about:

• Polyworld -- an Artificial Life computational ecology -- technical paper, executable, and complete source code are available. As are some Polyworld movies.

More details on the Polyworld page, but I am very pleased to say that a modern version of Polyworld, now built atop Qt, a cross-platform development framework from Trolltech, and OpenGL, is available, including open source code, through SourceForge.net at http://sourceforge.net/projects/polyworld. It currently builds and runs on Mac OS X and Linux, and should someday build and run on Windows. I have also recently published papers on increasing complexity and the evolution of Ideal Free Distributions (of agents to heterogeneous resources) based on Polyworld (details on the Polyworld page).

• Artificial Life -- using theoretical and computational biology to inform our understanding of natural biology, and as perhaps the only viable path to artificial intelligence.

I was pleased to be a co-organizer for the landmark Artificial Life X conference, held at Indiana University. I am also proud to be among the researchers engaged in ALife-related work at IU.

• Apple-Newton Handwriting Recognition -- Newton's "Print Recognizer" -- the world's first "truly usable" handwriting recognition system -- now shipping as Inkwell on Mac OS X 10.2 and later.
• Visualization of Natural Phenomena -- a book about the science and beauty of visualization.
• Koko the Gorilla's Computer Voice -- a Macintosh for Koko, to allow her to speak with sampled sounds (instead of her usual sign language).
• Vivarium -- My time with Alan Kay's Vivarium program, including a paper on its origins and history.
• On the Nature of Mind and Intelligence -- ruminations on the origin of consciousness in man and machine. Also see the slides of my talk at Digital Biota II (1998), in Cambridge, England, on The Evolution of Life and Mind. I was entirely pleased that Douglas Adams referred back to my talk a couple of times, as can be read and heard in book and CD versions of his Salmon of Doubt.
• Early History of Computer Graphics -- including some film, television, and experimental images from Digital Productions
• Terminator 2's technology -- my contribution to the special edition laserdisc and DVD.
• Science Fiction Utopias & Dystopias -- slides from a talk (or pair of talks) I have given a couple of times on the history of utopian and dystopian discourse, with a special focus on *topias in science fiction literature and film.

On a related note, I've also prepared a list of relatively recent science fiction literature that I am particularly fond of. It originally was intended just for a few friends, but it may be of interest to others looking for a good read, filled with interesting ideas.

• Me -- a brief bio, a more extended bio, or a full-fledged resume/CV.

I am pleased to say that since August 2004 I have been a faculty member in Complex Systems Group in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. I continued working with Apple Computer one day/week for about another year and a half, overlapping my university work, but in February 2006 I finally ended my relationship with Apple, after something like 18 years. I am now focusing full time on my Artificial Life research and my teaching responsibilities. I taught one semester of "Introduction to Informatics" (I101), but am mostly concentrating on my "Artificial Life as an approach to Artificial Intelligence" class for grad students and seniors (I400 / I590) and my "Introduction to Programming" class for sophomores (I210), and expect to be doing so for the foreseeable future. I am enjoying both.

• Other interests as time permits, including home theater-quality video and audio, satellite, Animaniacs (finally out on DVD, yay!!!), Firesign Theatre, horses (especially Tennessee Walkers), music (especially Jon Hassell, Steve Reich, Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert, Kate Bush, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal & Monsour Seck, lots of African, Unholy Modal Rounders w/ Peter Stampfel, Phyllis Chen's toy piano music, and on and on), theater, modern dance, science fiction, Douglas Adams (sigh), Terry Pratchett, Hoosier life, the universe, and everything...

If you think rich, complex, multi-harmonic toy piano music might interest you, be sure to check out the page I set up for Phyllis Chen. Right now this is the only place you can hear this wonderful music.

email: _lsyweb_(at)_beanblossom.in.us_ (remove underscores and make the obvious substitution for "(at)")