The digital revolution now engulfing our world emerged from the events during and immediately after the Second World War, when intellectual titans such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon roamed the Earth. Many of the predictions they made for the future in those early days are now reality, or something close to it. Turing foresaw computers as artificial intelligences. Neumann imagined machines that could reproduce themselves. Wiener guessed at a merging of biology and technology, and Shannon predicted the primacy of pure information over physical matter. But were these “founding fathers” to somehow see the state of modern computer science, they might be surprised that some of their wildest dreams are being fulfilled not under the explicit auspice of research, but of recreation. Here, Seed documents five projects that are expanding the boundaries of science through an increasingly vital medium: video games. —Abbie Morgan and Lee Billings
Emergence & Complexity
Spore
The same techniques scientists use to study the phenomena of emergence and complexity are also being used to create content in a video game. Spore, designed by Will Wright and developed by Maxis, lets players construct a creature and guide its growth from a microbe to a fully developed being. The creature then becomes part of a tribe that advances all the way to a space-faring civilization. Much of the game’s content is procedurally generated, meaning it is created “on-the-fly” while the game is in progress instead of being retrieved from storage, which results in drastic savings in memory usage. While scientists at prestigious research organizations like the Santa Fe Institute study the link between the structure and emergent functions of complex systems, Spore uses similar ideas to procedurally generate creature animation. The game decides how a newly created creature should move based on its body design instead of working from saved specifications. Many video games have used procedural techniques before, but none to the extent that Spore does. The music is even generated this way, by creating and merging musical fragments based on samples. In the future, the knowledge that simple rules can create complex phenomena will be used both in further research on emergent systems and in developing rich, realistic content for virtual worlds. www.spore.com
Brain-Computer Interaction
Emotiv Systems’ EPOC headset
When Nintendo’s Wii console was first released two years ago, gamers went crazy for the full-body physicality of its unique controls. Now, a company called Emotiv Systems hopes to turn that success on its head by letting players control games without even lifting a finger. Their new headset, called the Emotiv EPOC, uses electroencephalography (EEG) technology to measure the voltage produced by the combined activity of thousands of neurons in one area of the brain. Its 16 electrodes can detect brain activity to recognize emotions, commands, and facial expressions, and link them to operations or keystrokes in a wide variety of existing PC games and applications. For instance, the brain activity detected when a user thinks “jump” can be linked to the keystroke that makes a character jump in a game. In specially designed games, emotion recognition can be used to continuously adjust the game’s environment. If the player is bored, the game can get harder; if the player gets excited, the background music can adjust accordingly. Emotiv’s product includes one such program — a martial arts game where the player must master certain tasks, like lifting a rock with the mind, while traveling through a world that reacts to emotions and facial expressions. The headset will be available in late 2008, and Emotiv Systems expects users will soon develop their own ways to exploit this technology. www.emotiv.com
Crowdsourcing
Foldit
Biologists have known for decades how cells assemble proteins, the strings of amino acids that are vital to all living things. They also know that a protein’s molecular shape controls its biological function. But a complete understanding of how a protein’s constituent amino acids attract and repel each other to “fold” it into a characteristic shape remains elusive. Scientists can experimentally determine the shapes of proteins, and computers can predict how a protein might fold, but these processes are long, laborious, and not very much fun. Now, a team of biologists and computer scientists led by the University of Washington biochemist David Baker is hoping to change all that and transform the field of molecular biology. In May, they released Foldit, a free online game where protein folding is an addictive puzzle, and players compete for high scores with their most stable solutions. Thanks to clever game design, no prior knowledge of protein folding is necessary; anyone can play. Though most of the current Foldit puzzles are proteins whose shapes are already certain, future versions will allow players to tinker with proteins for which there are no known solutions, and even to design new proteins. By studying how humans solve the puzzles, Baker hopes to refine the techniques computers use to predict protein folding, which may ultimately aid the treatment and prevention of diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. www.fold.it
Science Education
Immune Attack
Immunology, the study of the immune systems of living things, is a famously intricate subject that can prove vexing to visualize and teach even at intermediate levels. Consequently, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has spent the last four years developing a video game, Immune Attack, meant to aid biology students in their final year of high school or first year of college. The game teaches important immunology concepts by having players pilot a “nanobot” through the blood vessels and tissue of a person with a malfunctioning immune system, training the various cells to do their jobs again along the way. The completion of each level requires an understanding of a specific aspect of immunology, such as how specialized immune cells flock to infected tissues or recognize harmful bacteria. For students who have been playing video games throughout their lives, Immune Attack could be an effective way to interest them in biology. The game has been tested in classrooms, and students who play the game become more knowledgeable and interested in the subject when compared with other students. The FAS hopes that games like Immune Attack will prove to be potent educational tools and change common perceptions about the value of video games. www.fas.org/immuneattack
Evolution
3D Virtual Creature Evolution
Simulating the development of a multivariate, dynamic system by specifying initial conditions and applying simple rules is not a new concept; scientists have been performing these experiments, either on computers or in their heads, for generations. But Lee Graham, a PhD student in computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, is taking this notion further to study how virtual creatures evolve. His application first generates random initial conditions that specify simple creatures made of connected blocks. The user selects a quality to be valued above others (jumping, walking, moving quickly, etc.), and creatures with this attribute are favored as “parents” as the population reproduces. The user can also set the size of the population, the likelihood of mutation, and various restrictions on the creatures’ bodies. Following algorithms that employ rules of natural selection and obey the laws of physics, the creatures gradually evolve, allowing the virtual process of evolution to be closely observed and studied with each generation. The results are often surprising. Besides obvious educational uses, like virtual class “pets” that evolve over a school year, the power of evolutionary computing can also be used to create machinery or procedures with greater efficiency than conventional designs. www.stellaralchemy.com/lee/virtual_creatures.html
Originally published September 7, 2008
