Mechanical Turk

A few years ago, Amazon came out with a project called Mechanical Turk. It's a service by which people can engage the labor of others to do small tasks that computers are not very good at. For example, if you wanted to look up the addresses of certain companies on the web, it would be a very challenging task for a computer, but not that hard for a human. However, it would also not be that interesting, and you probably wouldn't expect to get a job looking up addresses full-time. Enter Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

This Spring, once I put up the initial version of the Garden and told a few friends about it, progress was a bit sluggish, to say the least. After all, real evolution takes place over millions of years and millions of organisms. Even dog-breeding takes many generations to start to see a new breed emerge. So, although I can sit at my computer and click a few hundred plants, not a whole lot of change occurs.

So, I decided to make use of the Mechanical Turk to jump-start my project. I thought of it as another art supply, really. Not that expensive, but not something you'd spend money on unless you needed to.

I created a half a dozen tasks on Amazon's site. Each one described my project briefly, asked workers to vote for at least 25 plants and paid out somewhere between 25 and 50 cents. Using the Mechanical Turk, I was able to generate over 10,000 new plants, and it didn't cost me much more than buying a few tubes of paint and a brush at the local art supply store.

Because I wanted my workers to have a more streamlined work-flow than what you see in the Garden proper, I developed a completely different interface. I called it the Voting Booth, and this is where I sent workers to vote for plants. Check it out if you're interested:

The Voting Booth

People who worked for the Garden, seemed to enjoy the work. After all, voting for odd, plant-like shapes, is not uninteresting work. In fact, many people got so into the task that they voted for many more plants than was required.

It's an intriguing service and one that I hope to use again. In the next version of the Garden, the old genetic code will no longer work, so I'll need to jump-start the next version with new plants. (I do plan to keep the old Garden around, but the new one will be much improved.)

Gallery From 1st Garden Show

I finally got around to putting up a gallery of the prints I made from my favorite plants in the Garden for the June open studio at the Sunny Arms. I sold about a third of these and will likely show them again this Fall, along with whatever I come up with for the next version of the Garden.

Gallery of Garden Prints

Recombination - Bringing Sex To The Garden

I've spent the past few days working on a new plant genome. To date, I've added a new stem-drawing algorithm and made individual genes more stable. I've also enlarged a plant's overall growing space.

Today I created an interface to experiment with recombination. Up until now, all plant reproduction has been asexual. Each plant simply copies itself to create a new plant. Copy errors occur, which create variations, but ultimately, offspring are just slightly different versions of their parents. Today I experimented with crossing two different plants.

In the image below, two plants were crossed to produce a third:

Of course, the parents must have somewhat similar genes, or, when crossed, the structural changes are too drastic and the offspring look nothing like either parent. In some cases, crossing dissimilar parents results in a plant genome that doesn't draw anything at all, just like if you were to cross an orange tree with a cactus. There's a reason species design their reproductive organs such that only members of similar species can mate.

(This brings up interface design questions. Before, a visitor could click a plant and move on. For recombination, two plants must be selected. And, if the visitor tries to cross two very different plants, the result may not be all that compelling.)

Garden Update - Going Forward

It has been about three months since the Garden has fully gone live. It has received a lot of attention. In June, I had an open studio where many people who had never heard of the Garden came and witnessed it first hand, both in front of my computer and on the wall in the form of some of my favorite plants which I printed out and framed. I handed out cards with the address of the Garden and received many hits on my web site. Many new plants came into being from the surge in visitor interactions.

But, the current Garden is just version 0.1 of this project. It suffers from some shortcomings. Some of these are related to the mechanisms I developed for the genetic drawing instructions. Some are simple interface issues. Some limitations are inherent in the medium: no matter how cool an idea may be, it is rare that one visitor will make two trips to the same web site, unless rewarded heavily with new information or unless there is a transaction of ownership taking place.

I would like to address some of these shortcomings by redesigning the genetic code used by plants, improving the interface to the Garden and increasing a visitor's sense of ownership.

Currently a plant's genetic code is highly sensitive to small modifications. That is, by changing one gene, there is a cascading effect such that all subsequent genes change also. This worked well in fostering a high degree of variation, but did not work well when it came to make small modifications to an established genome. In fact, this sensitivity pretty much precludes evolution taking place in any coherent way. One of the first and probably most significant changes in the genetic code will be to make genes more concretely independent of where they are located in a plant's genome. This should have the immediate result that visitors will be able to see small variations and a progression from one plant form to the next.

There are many other changes I plan to make in the drawing instructions available to a plant, and I'll be writing more about these as they come up. But, this is not the only area in which the Garden could be improved. The interface is a bit clunky. It's hard to navigate through many plants quickly. It is hard to see how one plant begets another. I made an early decision to simplify the interface, perhaps at the cost of not providing enough information to the casual visitor. (The decision was also made in part due to time limitations.) But it was my fear that too much information might run people off.

However, in my first in-person presentation of this project (at the open studio), I found myself explaining the same complicated, but key concepts over and over. And I was surprised by how much more excitement I could see generated by knowing how the Garden was built, how plants reproduced, what determined their shape, how incidental interactions with visitors greatly influenced the beauty in the resulting plant forms. So, not only do I plan to build a more intuitive interface to the Garden, but I also want there to be more information at every level. I want to include statistics, explorations into plant genomes and more relational information, things like: show me the plants I voted for, show me the genealogy of a particular plant, show me popular plants, etc.

These last points, especially regarding popularity and votes, contribute to a sense of ownership. I believe that if visitors feel they own their contributions to the Garden and can track the progress of the plants they vote for and interact with, they might come back more often. I think only by this mechanism will the Garden truly flourish.

Evolution is a slow process and it takes millions of small events to mold complex and appealing forms. At some point, I think the Garden needs to live in peoples' phones, not just on my web site. People should be able to cultivate their own gardens if they like. To get really interesting, this project needs some years of active collaboration (in many platforms and venues), just like a real garden needs time for plants to become fully established. This is only the beginning. Stay tuned.

Pea Patch

I've had several ideas for some time now, each seemingly unrelated, each equally attractive. Finally, last night, I visualized how they might all link together into a single _thing_.

I've long wanted to create a slowly growing, evolving garden of plants that I would make a part of my home page for this site. Trees and shrubs would compete for space and survival, tangling with each other, accepting votes for particularly beautiful structures. The votes, along with other factors, would contribute to a plant's ability to further its genetic code and create more variations of itself.

I've also wanted to create more variations in my archive series. (Here's one, called the text archive I just dragged from the abyss of my hard drive and dusted off, just to see it living again on my site). The chief problem with these archives is getting people to contribute to them. They aren't very interesting until there are a few thousand contributions. Then the words start to create unexpected fragments that hint at some meaning you can almost grasp, but not quite. To me it's exciting to see the list of words get longer and know my project is growing, but the archives always suffer, I think, if I'm not there to explain how they work. (And nothing is ever improved by adding more links to more text...)

So, to meet the goals of: beauty, evolution, art and collaboration, I came up with the following idea:

There's a garden on my web site, as imagined before, slowly evolving, interesting but perhaps not so intriguing that somebody will come back and check it out later. Add a single mechanism, nonsensical, but just fine for art: One must feed the plants in order that they survive. How does one feed the plants? By talking to them. You type into the garden and your words and letters fall gently to the ground around the plants. Plants then take sustenance from the words. The words are absorbed (much like they are now in my text archive.) The plants grow. People who bother to talk to the plants influence their health directly by choosing which plants to type over. I think this has the proper confluence of mechanics that people might actually come back.

The final twist for this idea is to enable people, via a simple bit of code that anyone could paste into their blog or web site, to grow their own gardens. You could subscribe to my garden server. It would give you your own garden space. You could decide for yourself whether you would allow other people to talk to your plants or just yourself, whether it was private or public. And, the plant structures that would evolve would be unique to your garden.

The best part of all this is that growing plants and the necessary genetic database I'd have to maintain would not require frequent server traffic - it would be beautiful, personal and low-bandwidth.

No, the best part would be that the plants you grew would directly benefit from the words you typed, the thoughts you shared with them. The process of feeding your plants itself would be the primary art experience.