Saturday, November 10, 2007

Theo Jansen: The mordern day Davinci....

The art of creating creatures


Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who builds walking kinetic sculptures that he calls a new form of life. His "Strandbeests" walk the coastline of Holland, feeding on wind and fleeing from water.

Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been working for 16 years to create sculptures that move on their own in eerily lifelike ways. Each generation of his "Strandbeests" is subject to the forces of evolution, with successful forms moving forward into new designs. Jansen's vision and long-term commitment to his wooden menagerie is as fascinating to observe as the beasts themselves.

His newest creatures walk without assistance on the beaches of Holland, powered by wind, captured by gossamer wings that flap and pump air into old lemonade bottles that in turn power the creatures' many plastic spindly legs. The walking sculptures look alive as they move, each leg articulating in such a way that the body is steady and level. They even incorporate primitive logic gates that are used to reverse the machine's direction if it senses dangerous water or loose sand where it might get stuck.

"A self-styled god, Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind."
Wired News

At first it seemed like just art and engineering to me also. But then he said something significant - he uses just a handful of parameters on a basic design to create new creatures and then he uses "competitions" to select parameter values. Strictly this is exactly what DNA-based evolution does in biological systems. Both systems are reduceable to a set of "eigenvalues" which are coded by DNA expression levels or in this example by his "11 holy numbers" which are isomorphic to the same.
Those who declaim this as "evolution" or possibly life are using precisely the same arguments that Intelligent Design advocates use against evolution. Think about it. No this work isn't something that can be "emergent" from minimal components - it requires the prior evolution of "electrical tubes" and "water bottles" (made by evolution of humans before it) and there is an element of design involved but it represents a snapshot of what evolution is at any given moment in time for an animal that much respond to its external environment. Design = Technology = Tool Building. Even ravens use tools.
The claim that the animal "brain" isn't actual intelligence is perhaps strictly true but don't overestimate how the so-called "intelligent" human brain works. Watch some of the TED vids on human cognition especially Dan Dennet and Jeff Hawkins. Also consider the role of information theory and information channels on the upper bound of brain computation. Recent work on the human retina shows that it is an entropy maximizing filter which is a near-optimal low-pass filter. Our brains operate on far less incoming information than most people, especially many scientist and humanist, believe it does. The articles written about how "the human is a 4Mpixel camera", "we only use 10% of brain capacity", etc. are pure bunk.


Link to: Theo Jansen's Home Page

Theo Jansen - The father of Strand Beasts