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Craig Reynolds is an internationally renowned for his work with Boids, the program that first utilized flocking. With over 7 movie credits to his name (including Disney's TRON and Warner Brothers' Batman Returns), Reynolds was also "...winner of the Scientific And Engineering Award presented by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for pioneering contributions to the development of three-dimensional computer animation for motion picture production as part of the 70th Academy Awards® held in 1998...". A prominent figure in both the field of ALife and animation - Generation5 was honoured to have a chance to interview Mr. Reynolds:

Glossary

• Artificial Life • Boids • Reynolds, Craig

Back in college (in fact to some extent going back to my childhood) I had been interested in the concept of "autonomous characters". I had a hunch that a lot of seemingly complex behavior could be derived from relatively simple rules. It seemed like bird flocks would be a good example of this idea.

I assumed that birds could not be giving a lot of "thought" to flocking, both because they didn't seem to be especially intelligent animals and because flocking happened "in real time" at such a fast pace that there was no time for deep thinking. I realized that it must be a very different experience to be a member of a flock than to observe it from the outside, much like the difference between driving in traffic and standing on a roadside watching traffic whiz by. So I just tried to mentally put myself inside a flock and imagine what I would have to do to fly with them. I'd have to make sure I didn't get too close to any of my local flockmates. I'd want to be flying at the same speed and in the same heading as my local flockmates. (This also means I'm unlikely to collide with them in the near future.) And finally, if I noticed that all of my local flockmates where on one side of me, I'd want to drift over towards them.

It seemed that these three rules would be necessary conditions for flocking, but I didn't know if they would be sufficient. But once I tried the experiment (in 1986) by implementing the three rule model, it was clear that those three rules sufficed.

G5: Artificial Life is growly rapidly, where do you envision it in years to come?

I'm not comfortable making technological predictions. They are usually wrong, sometimes laughably so.

G5: What practical applications are there to ALife?

My work centers around applying them to animation for film and TV, and to interactive media such as games and virtual reality. Evolutionary computation (genetic algorithms and their kin) have already been applied to hundreds of commercial problems. Individual-based models are being applied to ecosystem simulations, planning pedestrian traffic through public buildings, and predicting how new products will be perceived by consumers. Artificial life techniques are rich with practical applications.

G5: How did your interest in ALife spread to that of Behavioural Animation?

It was the other way around. I'd been speculating about behavioral animation, and specifically bird flocks, since I was an undergraduate (around 1973). Eventually I figured I should either implement it or stop saying how it would be easy to do. It first worked in 1986. I published my paper on boids in 1987, and about a month later heard that a fellow named Chris Langton was organizing a workshop in Los Alamos called "artificial life".

G5: CyberLife recently created the game "Creatures" that modelled life to an incredibly realistic extent. Did you see this game as a pivotal point in the development of ALife?

While the Norns are indeed a sophisticated and comprehensive model, they do not break new ground in a technological sense. Nothing in the Creatures simulation was unprecedented in the ALife literature. On the other hand, I think it is is a very significant product because it made this models available to a huge population of non-specialists. Probably more people learned about artificial life because of Creatures than through any other channel. (Its also noteworthy that Millennium managed to cram so much detail into a modest sized computer.)