[ec2m] Physics engines

[Taylor, Tim]

Okay Colm, point taken! We certainly haven't ruled out
the possibility of developing an existing open source
product. The main criteria are that it should be
efficient and stable (hence the suggestion of using
Featherstone over more general approaches), but also
be able to simulate multiple articulated bodies
(preferably LOTS of them!) concurrently (with collision
detection) - which many existing engines (e.g.
DynaMechs) cannot cope with.

The idea is also to develop a product which ALife
researchers would find very easy to use and practical.
By "with evolutionary algorithms in mind" I meant that
we would also develop an API/communication protocols
to allow simulations to be initialised and controlled
over a network, so that it would be very easy to write
a distributed GA which would farm out simulations to 
multiple computers and collect the results. This would
likely be built on top of an exisiting parallel
computing protocol such as MPI or PVM.

Would this be a complete waste of time?

Tim


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Colm Massey [mailto:colm_massey at yahoo.co.uk]
> Sent: 20 September 2001 3:15 pm
> To: ec2m-list at alife.org
> Subject: [ec2m] Physics engines
> 
> 
> Dear Tim,
> I think that starting another open source physics
> engine project is crazy. As Richard Reeves pointed
> out, there is DynaTech, but there are more. In
> particular ODE, Russell Smith's engine. It looks very
> promising. I think it would be a great waste of money
> and time to start another one. Pick one which looks
> the most promising and sign up to support it.
> What do you mean when you say 'with evolutionary
> algorithms in mind'? 
> 
> Sorry to be a wet blanket!
> 
> Cheers,
> Colm
> 
>  
> 
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