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: