Playware ABC: Engineering Play for Everybody

This paper describes the Playware ABC concept, and how it allows anybody, anywhere, anytime to be building bodies and brains, which facilitates users to construct, combine and create. The Playware ABC concept focuses engineering and IT system development on creating solutions that are usable by all kinds of users and contexts. The result becomes solutions, often based on modular technologies that are highly flexible and adaptable to different contexts, users, and applications

Adaptive Approaches Towards Better GA Performance in Dynamic Fitness Landscapes

We review different techniques for improving GA performance. By analysing the fitness landscape, a correlation measure between parents and offspring can be provided, and we can estimate effectively which genetic operator to use in the GA for a given fitness landscape. The response to selection equation further tells us how well the GA will do, and combining the two approaches gives us a powerful tool to automatically ensure the selection of the right parameter settings for a given problem. In dynamic environments the fitness landscape changes over time, and the evolved systems should be able to adapt to such changes. By introducing evolvable mutation rates and evolvable fitness formulae, we obtain such systems. The systems are shown to be able to adapt to both internal and external constraints and changes

Playware Research – Methodological Considerations

Several sub-disciplines of engineering are driven by the researchers’ aim of providing positive change to the society through their engineering. These researchers are challenged by the traditional research method of experimental research with a waterfall model which demands clearly defined project definition and functional requirements, and impose a sequential processes leading to the final system evaluation, which may lead to solutions which work in the lab, but have little impact in the messy real world. Based on two decades research in developing engineering systems with a societal impact (e.g. in robotics, embodied AI, and playware), in this paper we suggest a cyclic research method based on a mix between participatory and experimental processes. In particular, inspiration from the action research method applied to interdisciplinary technology development becomes a participatory approach characterized by rapid prototyping cycles which allow iterative technology specification and development together with people in their real world environment

ALife for Real and Virtual Audio-Video Performances

MAG (an Italian acronym which stands for Musical Genetic Algorithms) is an electronic art piece in which a multifaceted software attempts to “translate” musical expression into a corresponding static or animated graphical expressions. The mechanism at the base of such “translation” consists in a quite complex and articulated algorithm that, in short, is based on artificial learning. Indeed, MAG implements different learning techniques to allow artificial agents to learn about music flow by developing an adaptive behaviour. In our specific case, such a technique consists of a population of neural networks – one dimensional artificial agents that populate their two dimensional artificial world, and which are served by a simple input output control system – that can use both genetic and reinforcement learning algorithms to evolve appropriate behavioural answers to an impressively large shapes of inputs, through both a fitness formula based genetic pressure, and, eventually, a user-machine based feedbacks. More closely, in the first version of MAG algorithm the agents’ control system is a perceptron; the world of the agents is a two dimensional grid that changes its dimensions accordingly to the host-screen; the most important input artificial agents get (i.e. not necessarily the only one) is the musical wave that any given musical file produces, run-time; the output is the behavioural answer that agents produce by moving, and thereby drawing on to a computer screen, therefore graphical. The combination of artificial evolution and the flows of a repeated song or different musical tunes make it possible for the software to obtain a special relationship between sound waves and the aesthetics of consequent graphical results. Further, we started to explore the concept of run-time creation of both music and graphical expression. Recently, we developed a software by which it is possible to allow any user to create new song versions of popular music with the MusicTiles app simply by connecting musical building blocks. This creation of musical expression can happen as a performance (i.e. run-time). When connecting the MusicTiles app to the MAG software, we provide the connection and the possibility to melt both musical expression and graphical expression in parallel and at run-time, and therefore creating an audio-video performance that is always unique