On the screen, an animated figure takes a step forward and tries to walk. Instead it collapses immediately, falls on its back, and flails its legs helplessly. Then it reappears at the left of the screen, takes a few delicate baby steps, and falls again. Returning to the screen, it raises its knees, takes six or so confident strides, and drops on its side. After trying over and over again to walk, the figure finally marches successfully across the screen as though its motions had been captured directly from videos of a human walking.
Illustration by Leo Espinosa
This little film won't win an Oscar for Best Animated Short, but the software that generated it stands as a small miracle of computer programming. The figure was not taught how to walk by an offscreen animator; it evolved the capacity for walking on its own. The intelligence to do so came from some clever programming that tries to mimic nature's ability to pass along successful genes.
