Artificial Life Plug-in Pack Version 1.06

Contents:
	Introduction
	What's New
	Influences/Resources
	Links
	Todo
	Contact


Introduction:

The Artificial Life Plug-in pack is a collection of Winamp
APE files and presets that show various Artificial Life algorithms.
These run under Winamp's AVS system.  It includes the following APEs:

ifs.ape			Version 1.00
flock.ape		Version 1.03
conway.ape		Version 1.03
flame.ape		Version 1.04

Along with several avs presets showing them.
The presets are fairly minimal.  You're welcome to send me some of
your own that use these APEs.

The APEs are installed in the plugins\avs directory under winamp.
The presets and readme get installed in plugins\avs\Artifiial Life

One of the central ideas in alife (Aritifial Life) is that complex
behavior can emerge from the interactions of several simple rules.
The resulting behavior is often lifelike.


What's New:

The flock plug-in now has modes to change behavior on beat detect.
The flame plug-in should crash less, and various other bug fixes.  The
convolution kernel plugin was removed.  It was a resource hog, and
needs serious work.

01/14/2002
- Added the IFS plug-in.  Try it out, it fucking kicks ass

08/02/2001
- Fixed color changing in Flame effect.  May still modify the random
  flame generation and colors.
- Added a bunch of presets.  More coming soon.

06/01/2001

- Flock now defaults to value of 5 for personal space instead of 0.

05/30/2001

- Fixed some bugs when resizing Conway's Game of Life
- Added ability to change rate of change in Game of Life


Influences/Resources:

The flock/boid model is based on ideas from Craig Reynolds.
Conway's Game of Life is a specific example of a cellular automaton.
The flame algorithm is fairly simple.  Just average each pixels four
neighbors and multiply by a cooling factor.

The bomb visualization system was one of my original influences for the
cellular automaton plug-in.


Links:

Craig Reynold's homepage: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/index.html

Cellular Automata:
http://alife.santafe.edu/alife/topics/cas/ca-faq/ca-faq.html


Todo:

- Basic physics spring/muscle model/plug-in
- More beat detect features and vis data usage.
- Flame effect should be able to load color maps or have more color
  control.
- Modify flame effect to produce smoke/cloud effects
- Add presets to Game of Life.  Also, ability for users to write
  own rules so as to allow any cellular automata the user wants.

Contact:

Joshua Gerrish

josh@itsdarkhere.com