(thanks to Georg Janick for the images)

on february 26th 2008, the first species of creatures that i introduced to caerleon isle hit some sort of critical mass and, as far as i can tell, in combination with the severe time dilation their (physics based) ‘food’ was causing, had a population explosion. unfortunately i was offline for two days and this allowed the creatures to replicate out of control swallowing up the entire islands resources.

here is my proposal for what happened:

a. the flyers have several ‘hard coded’ behaviors. the behaviours that i think are relevant here include that they will be attracted to, and consume spores when they detect one in their vicinity. they will continue consuming spores until they are full and the they become lazy and sleep off their meal. also if they notice an oversupply of spores they will self replicate. (i don’t intend to explicitly outline all behaviours as this will detract from the experiential nature of an encounter with them)

b. spores are created by the landscape at regular yet random intervals. they are controlled by the second life physics engine, their behaviuor can then be seen as being a result of the second life laws of nature.

c. i believe after a point the flyers all came into sync and became lazy and rested at the same time. this created an oversupply of food, which meant that self replication took advantage of this window of opportunity.

then

d. the laws of nature in second life (physics engine and script run time allocation and simulator frames per second etc.) all became overtaxed. depending on the state a particular object was in, it had more or less operations to fulfill, in an ever decreasing amount of time ie: the time allocated to running scripts per frame was becoming shared over many more scripts.

e. eventually the creatures just were not eating any more.. but instead they were replicating.. their scripts ran up until the replication call but failed to make the eat call.. the result…

The palace of memory project in second life has a new home. I am continuing to keep some land and projects in escanes, but i have also moved onto a new private island in a sort of second life social experiment where a group of artists and writers have come together to not only work on their own projects, but to forge new collaborations along the way..

from the Caerleon group charter: In ancient times, Caerleon was the legendary seat of King Arthur’s Camelot and birth place of the forge of Excalibur.

In the digital age, a collective of Second Life’s most talented artists, writers, poets and philosophers has come togther to give birth to a new legend and a totally new kind of magic. Caerleon is where art meets technology in a virtual world unlike any other…come be a part of the legend. 

Also described to me as an island of ‘misfits, poets, artists and philosophers,’ by my new SL neighbor and Caerleon resident Feather Boa.

two new images of the palace of memory showing the work in progress ‘oracle’. currently new versions ’street walker’ and ’street talker’ are collecting words for the oracle to use and learn from.

the palace maze is a continually changing work in progress. it started out in the very first palace of memory in hyland, and is a site that is primarily navigated and experienced through audio. the origins of this work lie in my experimentations with the unreal runtime engine, which i expect can be seen in the visual element of the work. this project is not always up, but when it is can be experienced through a link at the palace of memory’s teleport point.

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mawes seesaws and nonnatus korhonen. using only SL sliders, mawes is as short as you can be, while nonnatus is as tall as you can be.  mawes would like to visit more often but her dial up is too slow.

cellular automata: conway’s rules producing a gosper glider gun. scripts to follow when they are a little more stable

one incarnation of the palace of memory involved a maze of rotating text platforms connect by text bridges. texts flowed into and out of one another sometimes readable and at other times becoming incoherent characters. the navigators floated above these texts on their own platform.

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a snapshot of the home of the first palace of memory in hyland. shown is an early experiment in object self-replication. the code for the replicating pyramids is a version of the example given on the lsl wiki, with the ’safety checks’ removed, but the process slowed down to avoid the ‘grey goo fence.’