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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Stewart Brand
  • Stewart was a visiting something-or-other at the Media Lab when I was a graduate student, and an unofficial advisor to the Vivarium Project. I am quoted a couple of times in his book about the Media Lab.
from Alan Kay
from Tools for Thought
  • By now it's a cliche. Apple for a time adopted a variant of this as its own vision and marketing slogan ("Bicycles for the mind"), and supported efforts that fit in with it like Hypercard and Vivarium Project, but those values were swamped by powerful market forces
    Why Steve Jobs killed Hypercard Loper OS http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568 – because end-user programming was antithetical to the business model
    – the fact is that most people aren't interested in that sort of thing and there's more money to made in entertainment and idle social chatter.
from Book Reading/2025
  • Normally a Powers fan, this didn't quite do it for me. Maybe too close to home. One of the main characters is a hacker from Evanston, my hometown. Also "Playground" was one of the systems of Vivarium which also did quite a lot of modeling of ocean life. The book was a bit too schematic. Still some lovely depictions of ocean life. Also a nice ref to Finite and Infinite Games, underscoring the theme of life as Play.
from goddinpotty/TODOs
  • TODO Vivarium Project page has colors inverted in the graph
    • Ah this is because Vega assigns colors in order.
from Vivarium (2019)
  • The only reason I watched it was my affiliation, long ago, with the Vivarium Project. There weren't a whole lot of thematic reasonances, other than both were about forms of artificial life. But the older vivarium had the goal of allowing learners to create something that exhibits liveliness or at least models it. This movie was more of a horror story in which an imposed artificial system displaces, corrupts, parodies and destroys real life. Kind of a different vibe, although both play with the boundary between the living and the mechanical.
from Protocols/Formalism
  • The nice thing about agent-based modelling is that a child can understand it (this is the basis for Logo). It's a powerful thinking tool, and much more accessible than more mathy formalisms like CCS or category theory. I've built systems like this in the past, such as Behave! (an animal-behvior modelling environment designed for maximum non-technical accessibility). And see Vivarium Project for a more expansive version of the idea of a learning/simulation environment.
from Whole Earth Catalog
  • Here's the one time that I got a mention in Whole Earth Review for some of my Vivarium Project work, in 1989.
from Agency at the Media Lab
  • Because this was the Media Lab and because I've always hovered somewhere between the user interface design and language design ways of approaching things, I ended making a series of visual or semi-visual systems for building very simple models of agent-like behavior. Most of this work was done under the aegis of the Vivarium Project, an Apple-sponsored research program, directed by Alan Kay, which had the intent of inventing some new models for novice programming environments.
from Brainworks
  • This was the first system I built in pursuit of Vivarium Project goals, and it was largely based on Vehicles by Valentino Braitenberg.
Twin Pages

TwinPages: WikiWikiWeb

Vivarium Project

30 Oct 2021 - 24 Oct 2024
Open in Logseq

    • The mission

      • look closely at animal minds and ways to model them
      • use those insights to come up with new ideas for programming languages and environments
      • design child-friendly versions of those models, languages, and systems

    • Using ideas from:

      • AI languages (eg rule systems)
      • Society of Mind
      • ethology
      • situated action / behavioral robotics
    • maxresdefault.jpg
    • Alan Kay and some MIT grad students visit the LA Open School

    • The Blimp

      • One of the earliest projects at MIT was to build a robot blimp that could be controlled by simple a simple end-user-friendly programming language. This was in part inspired by the Wiesner Building's vast and otherwise kind of useless four-story atrium.
      • The blimp was based on a commerical RC kit we found; we augmented it with some ultrasonic rangefinders from a polaroid camera kit, and interfaced the sensors and motors to a visual programming language (the Hookup! language developed by Dave Levitt).