Nicholas Gessler, Information Science & Information Studies

What if you could create your own world, which followed your own rules, a world with agents whose perceptions and behaviors you designed, who lived in environments that you constructed?  What if you could put evolution to work inside that world?  How would that society change through time?  In ISIS (Information Science & Information Studies) 72, in LINK Classroom #6, and as part of the Visual Studies Initiative at Duke, we do just that.  We build highly interactive, visually compelling computer simulations that introduce participants to the philosophies and practices of the emerging “New Sciences of Complexity” and “Evolutionary Computation.”  Most students began with no previous programming and yet all of them have fashioned creative and imaginative experimental worlds relevant to the biological and social sciences, the humanities and arts.  Come see what we have done and where we’re going next.