Artificially evolved camouflage

Posted March 7, 2016 by Dave Griffiths

As the egglab camouflage experiment continues, here are some recent examples after 40 or so generations. If you want to take part in a newer experiment, we are currently seeing if a similar approach can evolving motion dazzle camouflage in Dazzle Bug.

Each population of eggs is being evolved against a lot of background images, so it's interesting to see the different strategies in use - it seems like colour is one of the first things to match, often with some dazzle to break up the outline. Later as you can see in some of these examples, there is some quite accurate background matching happening.

It's important to say that all of this is done entirely by the perception from tens of thousands of people playing the game - there is no analysis of the images at any point.