Evolutionary Spaceships

"Evolutionary Spaceships" introduces an engaging co-creative system converging human creativity with artificial intelligence, through an interactive, engaging, and co-creative interface. It is a form of system that assesses the significance of a component required to build a desirable spaceship configuration. Of which, the parameters are seen as a fundamental basis for the evolutionary algorithm to produce efficient designs based on the given parameters. Furthermore, with each iteration, the system develops unique configurations. It takes the previous generation's best performing ships, based on the users wants and needs, and tries to make a new generation by crossing over spaceships and applying mutations. It is a highly involved and interactive system; if the design does not suit the user's preferences, the user may modify the parameters while it is running to nudge it in the desired direction. For instance, if the user adjusts the power generation parameter to increase the scale of the spaceship, the design evolves to require more power, leading to an increase in solar panels. If the power must be distributed evenly across all components, the rest of the ship will evolve to accommodate the rise in power. 

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The interface of Evolutionary Spaceships’ is designed as a game website to enhance the experience of interaction. The co-creative system consists of 13 components that the algorithm can create spaceships with. Each component has it's own function within a ship, and the existence of these components within a ship determine how good a ship performs in certain factors. The user can input the parameters in the way they want their spaceship to perform, as the correlation between the parameters will define the overall design of the spacecraft. Evolutionary spaceships are developed using evolutionary algorithms, and the fitness function of the evolutionary algorithm defines how well a spaceship performs. When the user alters the wanted parameters of the ship, the user is altering the fitness function of the algorithm. The parameters can be modified from 'more' to 'less', such as increasing or decreasing the number of humans on board. Additionally, the users can reset the parameters and even download their designs in a png format after they have designed a spaceship to their needs. The panel on the right of the screen displays information about the best performing ship in the current generation, based on the established preferences of the user. This panel can be used by the user to perceive how well their ship is performing and improving.​

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This work was developed as the final assignment for the Computational Creativity course in collaboration with Rick Heemskerk.