Evolving Lego Structures Through Simulated Evolution

There is an interesting post at Think Artificial upon building Lego structures through evolutionary algorithms. See here.

There are nice structures evolved: bridges, trees, cranes, etc.

The simulator even takes into account some physical parameters, such as joint's configurations and gravitational forces to decide which blocks need to be prunned off or added. It's a nice post!

Ingo Rechenberg and his team at Technical University of Berlin has also applied evolutionary algorithms (a Nested Evolution Strategy) to evolve structures, such as bridges (more bridges here), cantlevers, and lens. For more applications, see Evolution Strategy in Action: 10 ES-Demonstrations. Hans-Paul Schwefel applied an evolution strategy to evolve a two phase flashing nozzle.

See below some images of structures evolved by Rechenberg's team.

01. A bridge.

Initial Configuration:



Final Evolved Configuration:




02. Lens.

Initial Configuration:




Final Evolved Configuration: