Algorithmic Botany
I ‘ve been re-reading ‘Out of Control, The Biology of Machines’ and took some time to look up some of the people mentioned who are creating virtual plant life.
If you are interested in creating plants for artificial worlds, or to use to study botany you’ll want to start with the Algorithmic Botany website. There are tons of papers you can download, a book ‘The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants’ and every thing you need to know about ‘cpfg’ the Plant and Fractal generator with Continuous Parameters. Which is a program you can use to generate your own plants using the L-system ( Lindenmayer System ).
If you’d like to dig into the L grammar itself as well as generate plants check out GroIMP, open source Java 3D software for modeling growth grammars.
More information:
Wikipedia, L-system
An interesting swarm algorithm based on bats
Metaheuristic algorithms such as particle swarm optimization, firefly algorithm and harmony search are now becoming powerful methods for solving many tough optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new metaheuristic method, the Bat Algorithm, based on the echolocation behaviour of bats. We also intend to combine the advantages of existing algorithms into the new bat algorithm. After a detailed formulation and explanation of its implementation, we will then compare the proposed algorithm with other existing algorithms, including genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm seems much superior to other algorithms, and further studies are also discussed. [download the paper pdf]
More information
Other swarm papers by Xin-She Yang
Lecture notes on Network Information Theory
If you are interested in network information theory you might want to check out this pdf of combined lecture notes from several graduate classes.
Network information theory deals with the fundamental limits on information flow in networks and optimal coding techniques and protocols that achieve these limits. It extends Shannon’s point-to-point information theory and the Ford–Fulkerson max-flow min-cut theorem to networks with multiple sources and destinations, broadcasting, interference, relaying, distributed compression and computing. Although a complete theory is yet to be developed, several beautiful results and techniques have been developed over the past forty years with potential applications in wireless communication, the Internet, and other networked systems.
This set of lecture notes, which is a much expanded version of lecture notes used in graduate courses over the past eight years at Stanford, UCSD, CUHK, UC Berkeley, and EPFL, aims to provide a broad coverage of key results, techniques, and open problems in network information theory. The lectures are organized in a “top-down” manner into four parts: background, single-hop networks, multi-hop networks, and extensions. The organization attempts to balance the introduction of new techniques and new models. Extensions (if any) to many users and large networks are discussed throughout. The lectures notes provide a unified, simplified, and formalized treatment of achievability using a few basic lemmas. The proofs in the lecture notes use elementary tools and techniques, which should make them accessible to graduate students in EE, CS, Statistics, and related fields as well as to researchers and practitioners in industry.
