Dancer project 1.0 available

[Paul E Johnson]

Dear Friends:

We have been working on a project that uses computer simulation in Swarm 
to model dance movements of individual agents. Paul worked on the Swarm 
part, representing the individual behavior rules that govern a dance 
model that Tina designed.  We have a simulation of a short dance with 5 
dancers.  Tina took the Swarm output and converted it into a pretty 
representation with the Life Forms software.  There are snapshots of the 
presentation in the paper that we have written about the project, which 
is here:

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/Dancer/dance6.html

or, if you want a Word document, look here

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/Dancer/dance6.doc

Tina also generated a quicktime movie of the dance that the model 
generated. The quicktime movie is online here:

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/Dancer/Dance.mov

Or you can download the smaller compressed version here and play it 
after you unzip it:

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/Dancer/Dance-qtMovie.zip

The Swarm code for that simulation model is here:

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/Dancer/Dancer-1.0-Swarm2.1.140.tar.gz

As a Swarm exercise, that code is interesting because it makes use of 
dynamic scheduling to allow the dancers to plan their actions 
individually, according to the number of beats (time steps) that each 
dance movement requires. Some steps are long, requiring several time 
steps in the simulation, while some are not.  The model also uses a 
hacked version of the Swarm graphLib to allow some direct user 
intervention into the dance's choreography.  One can interact with the 
computer dancers by telling them explicitly what steps to take next, and 
so one can create a dance through a mixture of the rules used by the 
computer agents as well as human judgment.  No special libraries, beyond 
Swarm itself, are required to run this simulation.  The software 
includes a README file that covers many of the highlights.

On the basis of this exercise, we are considering the value of the 
conjecture that an agent-based simulation can create art!  Perhaps there 
are true interdisciplinary opportunities in this kind of work.  (Perhaps 
there is only annoyance for programmers, dancers, and choreographers, 
only time will tell!)

Feel free to let us know if you try the sofware and have any trouble, or 
if you have some comments about the paper.  It has been proposed to a 
conference on evolutionary computation this summer, but we have some 
time to revise the presentation before we have to submit a finalized 
version.

Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
1541 Lilac Lane, Rm 504
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66044-3177           FAX: (785) 864-5700


Tina Yu
ChevronTexaco Information Technology Company
6001 Bollinger Canyon Road
San Ramon, CA 94583
address@hidden
http://www.improvise.ws




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