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ARTIFICIAL LIFE! Awesome P2P java project needs members

 
Greenhorn
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http://www.daliworld.net/index.html I think you will find it very cool. I put an article written on us from Wired below.
Thanks!
Monica McDonald

This New App Sounds Fishy
By Michael Stroud
2:00 a.m. Aug. 1, 2001 PDT
Tired of having the same old fish swim across your screensaver? How
about fish that have minds of their own and swim off your screen onto
someone else's in, say, Japan?
That's the idea behind DALiWorld, peer-to-peer software that debuted
this week. It allows you to create a virtual aquarium on your computer
housing your own artificially intelligent fish, and any others that wander
by.
The software -- the brainchild of three computer scientists and a
young dot-com millionaire -- is one of the first examples of how a
technology best known for song-swapping on the Internet is emerging as a
foundation for a new generation of online games.
"Traditional peer-to-peer software like Napster or Gnutella is just
about moving files," said DALi CEO Todd Pappaioannou, a PhD from England's
Loughborough University and an authority on "mobile agents" software that
travels from computer to computer.
"What we're talking about is shared, networked entertainment -- people
interacting in the same virtual world from wherever they are."
All of the virtual fish and aquariums are built using Sun
Microsystems' Java language. And it just so happens that one of Sun's chief
goals is to get game developers to write their games in Java -- enabling
people to access their favorite games over PCs, Macs, interactive
televisions, cellular phones and any other computing device. DALi hopes to
do exactly that with its fish world over the next year.
DALiWorld is "the poster child," Pappaioannou says, for the tiny
company's technology for allowing gamers to trade software agents over
massive distances and injecting artificial intelligence into games.
Pappaioannou hopes DALiWorld will evolve into a complex universe where
players can create their own creatures, communicate with players from around
the world, forage for food and even fiddle with the biochemistry of the
virtual environment.
For the moment, people who download the software will have to be
satisfied with watching fish swim lazily on and off their screens, and
right-clicking on them to see where they've come from.
DALi Inc. (which stands for Distributed Artificial Life, not the
surrealist Salvador) has created 20 varieties of fish that the user randomly
generates when pressing a "new fish" button on the virtual aquarium. Each
fish is modeled after a real fish, such as an angelfish or a blowfish, and
the programmers added five "special fish" that occasionally get created to
spice things up.
Users can follow fish by clicking on their cursors and zoom in on fish
by left-clicking on them. They cannot, however, control where the fish go or
what they do. Some simply hover, while others swim rapidly from side to
side, or appear to stick close to others.
DALi doesn't control the creatures either, merely creating the "life
forms" according to software algorithms that allow them to decide -- as well
as a real fish can -- where and how they want to swim.
Could such fish, prompted by a craftily inserted virus, swim right
into someone's hard drive and total it?
Pappaioannou insists that the chances of that happening are small,
given security features in both the company's software and Java itself --
although he allows that "I'd be an idiot to say never."
Virtual fish -- especially ones that use up a fair amount of silicon
horsepower to power their "intelligence" -- might seem a rather boring
addition to an electronic device. But cyber-fish seem to have an enduring
popularity, as witnessed by the ubiquity of Berkeley Software's own fish
screensavers and the surprising success of fishing games on cellular phones
and portable devices in Europe and Japan.
Pappaioannou has no intention of stopping with fish, although his
plans for creating more evolved species will take a lot more computing power
and employees than DALi has now. Ultimately, though, "I see the day when a
fish looks up through the ocean and catches its first sight of dry land."
Copyright (C) 1994-2001 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.

------------------
Come check out our world at www.daliworld.net!
 
Ranch Hand
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Scala Java
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I always thought that napster and gnutella acted like jini technology. the only thing holding back games developed in java is still the speed issue. games demand a lot of silicon power in the first place and while java is getting faster, speed is still a problem when it comes to modern game software. i once tried an online game written in java and it was horrible. my char couldnt really do anything because it was so slow. others with more powerful computers could though. i watched them whiz past me while i waited for my last mouse action to happen.
 
Bartender
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IntelliJ IDE Spring Java
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What's up with all the Virtual distributed fish tanks written in Java? I went to the Boston Museum of Science a few weeks ago and they have "The Virtual Fish Tank" exhibit to illustrate complex systems. It's got real-time 3D animation and was written in Java, too...

Randall, it sounds like the problems you had with speed may have more to do with the speed of your internet connection than the speed of Java, or maybe a little bit of both...

-Nate
[This message has been edited by Nathan Pruett (edited August 21, 2001).]
 
Monica McDonald
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Hey there.
I appreciate the link to the Boston museum, however this app is something you can download onto your personal computers and then share fish with your friends. Soon you will be able to encrypt messages in your fish. Let me know what you think. www.daliworld.net
Monica
------------------
Come check out our world at www.daliworld.net!
 
Nathan Pruett
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IntelliJ IDE Spring Java
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Yeah, the Boston Museum one isn't P2P, it only lets you put your fish in your personal tank or the big one at the museum... I just thouht it was interesting that the 'virtual fishtank' idea was used in two different ways in two of the biggest java apps I have seen...

I've got the DALiWorld screensaver on my comp now... churning out those fish...

-Nate
 
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This seems like a huge project to undertake. And to me it seems useless.
I would never run a program like this. How boring. A total waste of resources and bandwidth. Youd think if they could program something like this they would have done something a bit more interesting.
 
Monica McDonald
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Well, I understand that you find it boring but you should try and be a little bit more constructive so that I can understand more why you would call this a "waste of bandwidth." The concept is the potential of P2P architectures. And the cool part is the enhanced features that will be coming up -- like games, encrypted message fish, building your own fish/environment, etc. And having it shared with everyone all around the world!!
------------------
Come check out our world at www.daliworld.net!
 
Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs.
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