Swimbot NFTs Evolve & Compete With Each Other Off-Chain -- New Project from Virtual World/Artificial Life Pioneer Jeffrey Ventrella

Update, 2/14: In Comments, Ventrella credits his collaborators on this project: "The NFT pool itself was mostly the brainchild of Canton Becker (@canton), and he oversaw the project. Luka Negoita (@lukanegoita) invented the "selfish gene" algorithm that calculates the influence of NFT genes on the evolving population. I want to give a shout out to these two amazing, creative people."

Swimbots NFT is a new and unique application of non-fungible tokens, because unlike nearly all other NFTs, they're not simply about "registering" a JPEG doodle. Here, instead, the NFT is associated with a Swimbot artificial organism which then evolves and competes with other Swimbots off-chain. (Watch above.) And while I have a very pronounced skepticism to NFTs in general, this project is worth looking into for at least three reasons:

• It's co-created by Jeffrey Ventrella, an indie developer who did some pioneering work for Second Life and other virtual worlds, and is a direct spinoff of his long-running artificial life Swimbots project.  
• It's run on the Tezos blockchain, which has way less energy-consumption problems than ETH/Bitcoin blockchains.
• Good god I'd really like to see people try experiments with NFTs that aren't just static JPEGs that we're supposed to get excited about and burn our money on, speculating.

"We are trying to add some value to the NFT phenomenon," as Ventrella puts it to me, "which is overrun with crappy amateur art, and the artless speculators who throw money at this garbage. We are planning on developing these technologies further so NFT's have extended value in a gamified space."

His Swimbots even operate on a famous evolutionary principle:

"They are NFT's and so the NFT owners can compete to see how much their swimbot NFT's are able to spread their genes into the future. We devised a 'selfish genes' algorithm that calculates the amount of genetic material each NFT contributes to the population. This will add energy to the secondary market, and it allows these NFT's to have long term value. We may extend the pool further."

Check it out here. When we spoke last night, under 200 Swimbot NFTs had been bought, so hundreds more still are available to try surviving in the evolutionary gene pool. The process it automatic, so once you buy the NFT, your associated Swimbot shows up in the pool soon after.

Comments

[Ventrella]

Thanks for writing about this project. It was actually a highly-creative collaboration. The nft pool itself was mostly the brainchild of Canton Becker (@canton), and he oversaw the project. Luka Negoita (@lukanegoita) invented the "selfish gene" algorithm that calculates the influence of NFT genes on the evolving population. I want to give a shout out to these two amazing, creative people.
-Jeffrey

[Wagner James Au]

Thanks, will add this in an update!