On your marks

By Simon Tsang
November 27, 2004
DRAWING: Illustration: Simon Letch

DRAWING: Illustration: Simon Letch

They walk, tumble, crawl, writhe, roll and bounce around. It's a race and contestants can take any shape or form, from four-legged walkers to amoebas. The only thing is, this race doesn't exist in the real world. It's entirely online and competing "animals" are little more than wire-frame models that follow some basic physical principles such as mass and gravity.

Welcome to Sodarace. Developed as a joint project between Soda - a British multimedia design company - and the University of London, Sodarace tackles the age-old question: which is better - man or machine? Human ingenuity or artificial intelligence? Indeed, its website promotes the venture as "the online Olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning".

Users can build any creature they conjure up using the Sodaconstructor virtual construction kit - a Java application from the Sodarace website. Programmers and those in the field of AI can then apply their algorithms to the creature to come up with a faster model. The virtual creatures are then submitted to compete in races across all kinds of two-dimensional terrain in the Sodarace forums.

Stefan Westen is a software developer for Wallingford Software in the UK and discovered Sodarace from a story in ZDNet. The idea of humans versus AI in a race intrigued him.

"I had a look on the Sodarace website and saw that others had written AI programs to design models for the race," he says. "Then I decided to try and write a simple AI program to optimise these models."

In doing this, programmers take an existing model and use their AI algorithms to improve it. One popular method is to use a genetic algorithm that - put simply - tests a large number of possible combinations and carries the best mix into the "next generation" of the model. It's a method likened to the theory of evolution and has its share of passionate proponents and detractors.

"Humans can beat AI because we can think, we're not just a program that takes a model and randomly changes it millions of times. The only thing computers have that beats us is the processing speed at which they carry out tasks," wrote one website user in the forum's artificial intelligence thread.

"Why do you feel the need to attack AI? Are you insecure?" responded another.

It's as much about good old-fashioned one-upmanship as it is about serious scientific research. "In the race forum on the Sodarace website there was a very interesting competition going on where AI programmers would post a model and then model builders would post a faster [one]," Westen says.

"I spent many evenings programming until late at night to optimise my program so it would beat the fastest model in the forum. As far as I can remember I still have the record for this race: 381 frames."

Looking at the models, they appear remarkably complex - a two-dimensional line drawing that has the illusion of existing in three dimensions. However, the creatures are made up of surprisingly simple parts of "springs", "muscles" and "joints" defined by a small set of variable parameters such as gravity, friction and spring stiffness.

That Sodarace is designed to be fun and work like a game is no accident. Soda - the co-developer - believes in breeding creativity through play. There are no age limits. Anyone can join in and build models. They don't even have to race them. Some have submitted simple drawings that animate, such as the creative entry called "London Bridge" that (of course) tumbles down as soon as you load it up.

This doesn't mean it's easy though; just that it can be as simple or complex as you want. It took me at least 10 attempts before coming up with a design that didn't collapse like a marionette with its strings cut as soon as I turned the simulator on.

A year on from when it was introduced, however, the Sodarace story has a twist. Westen became frustrated with its limitations and decided to build his own race called Mins (Mins Is Not Soda). "I started to notice that somehow there was an 'upper limit' for the speed of models. They just wouldn't go any faster," he explains. "I found that there is a hard limit on the speed of Soda models. In theory, there is no maximum limit in Mins." Westen is even talking about adding other "events" such as high jump and tug-of-war to further challenge builders and AI programmers.

Meanwhile, the debate about humans versus AI continues in the Sodarace forums. Perhaps if the two would just learn to work together. But then again, where's the fun in that?