Larry Yaeger's Home Page

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This is the place for (not necessarily up-to-date) information about:

• Polyworld -- an Artificial Life computational ecology -- technical paper, executable, and complete source code are available.  As are some Polyworld movies.

More details on the Polyworld page, but I am pleased to say that a modern version of Polyworld open source, built atop Qt and OpenGL, is available through github at https://github.com/polyworld/polyworld. The SourceForge.net version is also still available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/polyworld, however all development since 2015 has been through the github repository.  Polyworld currently builds and runs on Mac OS X and Linux (though some folks have encountered an as yet problem on recent Linux releases). It has also been built and run on Windows, but the code may take some tweaking, and this isn't really a supported configuration.

Using Polyworld I have published papers on evolutionary increases in neural complexity, the evolution of Ideal Free Distributions (of agents to heterogeneous resources), and the evolution of small world networks absent the kind of physical constraints thought to produce these kinds of networks in biological brains (a few details and paper links on the Polyworld page). It has also been used at Keele University in the UK and three PhD students at Indiana University have used Polyworld to investigate the evolution of species (using gene cluster analysis identical to that used in biological studies), to study the role of neuromodulation in adaptive behavior, and to study the evolution of neural dynamics towards the edge of chaos.

• Artificial Life -- using theoretical and computational biology to inform our understanding of natural biology, and as perhaps the only viable path to artificial intelligence. I was pleased to be a co-organizer for the landmark Artificial Life X conference, held at Indiana University (IU), and to have pursued my ALife research for eight years at IU.
• Apple-Newton Handwriting Recognition -- Newton's "Print Recognizer" -- the world's first "truly usable" handwriting recognition system -- subsequently shipped as Inkwell on Mac OS X 10.2 and later.
• Visualization of Natural Phenomena -- a book about the science and beauty of visualization.
• Koko the Gorilla's Computer Voice -- a Macintosh for Koko, to allow her to speak with sampled sounds (instead of her usual sign language).
• Vivarium -- My time with Alan Kay's Vivarium program, including a paper on its origins and history.
• On the Nature of Mind and Intelligence -- ruminations on the origin of consciousness in man and machine.  Also see the slides of my talk at Digital Biota II (1998), in Cambridge, England, on The Evolution of Life and Mind.  I was entirely pleased that Douglas Adams referred back to my talk a couple of times, as can be read and heard in book and CD versions of his Salmon of Doubt.
• Early History of Computer Graphics -- including some film, television, and experimental images from Digital Productions
• Terminator 2's technology -- my contribution to the special edition laserdisc and DVD.
• Science Fiction Utopias & Dystopias -- slides from a talk (or pair of talks) I have given a couple of times on the history of utopian and dystopian discourse, with a special focus on *topias in science fiction literature and film.

On a related note, I've also prepared a list of relatively recent science fiction literature that I am particularly fond of.  It originally was intended just for a few friends, but it may be of interest to others looking for a good read, filled with interesting ideas.

• An easy to use Mutual Information Calculator I threw together because I couldn't find one on the web.
• Me -- a brief bio, a more extended bio, or a full-fledged resume/CV.

I retired in August 2018, after spending six years at Google, doing machine learning and applying information theory to predictive modeling. From August 2004 to September 2012 I was a faculty member at Indiana University in the School of Informatics in the Complex Systems Group.   I continued working with Apple Computer one day/week for about a year and a half, overlapping my university work, but in February 2006 I finally ended my relationship with Apple, after something like 19 years.  My time in academia focused on my Artificial Life research and, of course, teaching responsibilities.  I taught one semester of "Introduction to Informatics", but mostly concentrated on my "Artificial Life as an approach to Artificial Intelligence" class for grad students and seniors and my "Introduction to Programming" class for sophomores.  I enjoyed both. Prior to Apple I wrote computer graphics software for Digital Productions from 1982 to 1987. And started my career in Aerospace Engineering at Grumman Aerospace ('72-'77), Rocketdyne ('77-'79), and Poseidon Research ('79-82).

I don't expect to put much time or energy into it, but in order to have a place to write arbitrary prose on any subject and, initially, to document a particular technical problem with certain drive docks, I created a blog at yaygrrrr.blogspot.com. I'm particularly fond of "Infinite != All", "It's orthogonal, dammit!", and "I'm determined it's deterministic (maybe)".

• Other interests as time permits, including home theater-quality video and audio, Animaniacs (finally out on DVD, yay!!!), Firesign Theatre, horses (especially Tennessee Walkers), music (especially Jon Hassell, Steve Reich, Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert, Kate Bush, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal & Monsour Seck, lots of African, Unholy Modal Rounders w/ Peter Stampfel, Phyllis Chen's toy piano music, and on and on), theater, contemporary dance, ballet, science fiction, Douglas Adams (sigh), Terry Pratchett (sigh), life, the universe, and everything...

email: _lsy_(at)_pobox_(dot)_com_  (remove underscores and make the obvious substitutions for "(at)" and "(dot)")