a rightly timed pause

The software that controls the virtual creatures is an artificial neural network which is roughly modelled on the brain.

Prof Ralf Der at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig and the team at Edinburgh’s School of Infomatics has applied the software to simulated animals and humans that are not given any explicit instructions on how to move. Nor do they know anything about the virtual environment.

All the neural network brain of each creature has to work with when controlling the humanoid is the angle of the 15 joints of the virtual creature. Dogs and snakes have up to 25 so called degrees of freedom.

The clever part is that the network is controlled by a process called “self regulation”.