Events
Thurston Seminar - Evolutionary Art, Computer Games and Business by Prof William Latham of Goldsmiths College
| Date: | Monday 16 March 2009 14:00 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Engineering, Room 148 (UPC ) |
On Monday, March 16th, at 2.00 pm in the UPC (Eng 148), we shall be holding the first of the Thurston Seminars. These are designed to be of general interest to the whole of the School and indeed to the rest of the College. They are named after A.P.Thurston, who began teaching aeronautics here in 1907, and whose achievements we commemorated in the 100-year celebrations. However, the seminars bear no particular relationship to aerospace.
The first seminar will be given by Prof William Latham of Goldsmiths College on ' Evolutionary Art, Computer Games and Business '.
A former computer games developer, he is internationally known for his 'mutation art', which relies on the ideas of Charles Darwin. He creates 3D shapes, chooses the ones he likes best, and then from them 'breeds' variant offspring forms, repeating the process across many generations. An example is shown in the attachment. The software to mutate the traits is akin to a genetic code, and he is working with biologists to predict the shapes of synthetic proteins.
Image from William Latham’s web-site: doc.gold.ac.uk/~latham/
