Computationally Recreating the Cambrian Explosion of Vision
Starting with a single light-detecting cell, our digital creatures face challenges that shaped real eyes over millions of years: navigating the world, discerning food from poison, and evading predators.
Emergence of eyes from single light-sensitive photoreceptors
Our digital creatures evolve different eyes based on survival needs - compound-like eyes for navigation, camera-like eyes for food and poison discrimination.
Why do eyes have lenses?
Our creatures independently discover solutions that nature found - like lenses that focus light - emerging naturally to balance survival pressures and physical constraints of their environment.
Projects / Papers / Visual Exhibits
What if Eye...? Computationally Recreating Vision Evolution
Kushagra Tiwary*, Aaron Young*, Zaid Tasneem, Tzofi Klinghoffer, Akshat Dave, Tomaso Poggio, Dan-Eric Nilsson, Brian Cheung **, Ramesh Raskar **
We computationally recreate the vision evolution to study what-if scenarios that never happened in nature and understand the principles behind biological vision evolution.
* Equal contribution ** Equal advising
Paper (arXiv Preprint) Blog TEDx TalkArtificial Cambrian Intelligence: Evolve your own creatures in our simulator!
We've created a simulator where you can define and evolve your own embodied agents. You can define your own task, or use existing ones, and evolve agent's eyes or brains.
Documentation ExamplesA Roadmap for Generative Design of Visual Intelligence
Kushagra Tiwary, Tzofi Klinghoffer*, Aaron Young*, Siddharth Somasundaram, Nikhil Behari, Akshat Dave, Brian Cheung, Dan-Eric Nilsson, Tomaso Poggio, Ramesh Raskar
Can we use biological principles (natural evolution) to study the evolution of vision and design more intelligent artificial vision, i.e. enable a Cambrian Explosion of artificial vision.
MIT Press Impact PaperExhibits: Experience the First Signs of Vision in Virtual Reality!
Cathy Chang, Aaron Young, Kushagra Tiwary
We are exhibiting our evolving eyes at multiple venues! Check it out!
MIT Museum Museum of Science More Details
