<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><BASE
href=http://www.femtopizza.net/ head <>
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY text=black bgColor=white>
<DIV>From the <A
href="http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994456">New
Scientist</A>: An online game that lets contestants build and race virtual
beasts is being used to pit humans against a variety of artificial intelligence
algorithms. The objective of <A href="http://sodarace.net/">Sodarace</A>, which
started at the end of November, is to construct a two dimensional creature that
can travel over a certain type of terrain in the shortest possible time. Each
creature is constructed of "mass", muscles", "limbs" and "joints" which control
the way it moves. These creations can then be raced over a piece of terrain.
Creatures can have many limbs or none at all and can walk, wriggle or even jump
along. <BR>It is relatively simple to construct a creature by hand. But the game
has been written so that a creature's key parameters can easily be fed into
another computer program and artificial intelligence (AI) programmers are being
invited to take part. So far, Sodarace has attracted thousands of contestants
from around the world. These include hobbyists and professional AI researchers.
In the first round, a human player was able to outwit competing computer
algorithms to develop the fastest creature.</DIV></BODY></HTML>