Artificial Life, Behavior Trees and Optimization
22Listen to James Schumacher talking about his experience spending the best part of a decade so far making a realistic 3D evolution simulator on a part-time basis.
James is the lead developer of the game 'Species: Artificial life, Real evolution' (http://www.speciesgame.com), designed to be a simulation of emergent evolution from the real-life principles of random mutation and natural selection. James is a part-time developer and full-time science geek.
He talks about genetic algorithms and taking advantage of evolutionary algorithms to find exploits in the game environment. He discusses the advantages and disadvantages of choosing behavior tree's for AI and some of the optimization techniques he has used to stop 1000+ unique creatures from melting players' PCs.