# Nobody designed this body. Which of the four would you bet on?

- Series: [How It's Clipped](https://miu.fm/howitsclipped.md)
- Published: 2026-10-16
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/nobody-designed-this-body-which-of-the-four-would-you-bet-on

## Story

Nobody designed this body. Which of the four would you bet on?

In 1994 Karl Sims, at Thinking Machines, wrote the goal instead of the creature: each body and its little brain grew from one code, "no hand-designed seed genotypes were used", and evolution kept whatever swam, walked or jumped best. It obeys the goal to the letter. His first walkers grew tall and won "by simply falling over", so he let every creature settle before the race. And "Any bugs" in the physics "will inevitably be discovered and exploited by the evolving creatures."

Our own 2D run, springs and muscles, one goal: go fast. 300 creatures a generation, the best fifth have children. B, the fastest at the start, had the biggest family for six generations. Then C took over, and from generation 21 every creature came from C. Its winner leaps along in long bounds; nobody designed that gait. Sims saw new runs find "completely different locomotion strategies", and hoped for "a powerful tool for the creation of desirable complexity for use in virtual worlds and computer animation."

The creatures, the races and the generation wall are our own evolution, not footage from Sims's work.

Which one did you pick?

Sources: Karl Sims, "Evolving Virtual Creatures", SIGGRAPH 94; Karl Sims, "Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition", Artificial Life IV, 1994; Joel Lehman, Jeff Clune, Dusan Misevic and others, including Karl Sims, "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution", Artificial Life, 2020.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).

## Watch

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1639678567814005/

---

Under copyright law, a quotation must name its source: Miuradio, https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/nobody-designed-this-body-which-of-the-four-would-you-bet-on

© 2026 Miuradio, https://miuradio.com