Rudy Rucker's Boppers Artificial Life Lab

Boppers Downloads

This is Version 1.01 of the Boppers software which accompanied the book Artificial Life Lab by Rudy Rucker, Waite Group Press, 1993, now out of print. The Boppers software is copyright (C) Autodesk 1992 and copyright (C) Rudy Rucker 1993.

This is a special shareware release of the software. The program may be freely recopied, but may not be commercially used or resold without written permission from Rudy Rucker. You can contact Rucker as: rucker@mathcs.sjsu.edu.

The program requires VGA color or better, Windows (3.1, 95, 98, or NT), and 4 Meg of RAM to run. Better speed will be obtained with a math coprocessor when using the "boid" Boppers. (Actually on today's machines, the program runs almost too fast; there is a speed control.)

Make a Boppers directory on your hard drive and copy the files on this disk into the Boppers directory. Double click on the Boppers icon to run the program. You can right drag the icon to your desktop to make a shortcut.

Information on the Boppers controls can be found by using the Boppers Help Menu to select Help On Boppers. More information can be found by reading the Artificial Life Lab manual online.

Download the Boppers: Artificial Life Lab Software. Posted November 27, 1996.

You can also download the Boppers source code. This code is not very nice or clean, it was written mostly in C with a few C++ trimmings, using the Borland compiler. But if you want to write a turmite or evolving boid program, it may be useful for you to be able to look at the Boppers algorithms.

Download the Boppers Source Code 400K Zip archive file, BopSrc1.zip. Posted January 1, 1999.

Here is a link to A JAVA Artificial Life program based on Rucker's Boppers program. Complete with source code. Taku Shibata's Home Page

More extensive information on the Boppers program can be found in the Artificial Life Lab book. As mentioned above, this book is out of print now. As of March 8, 1998, I've placed it online as a single large HTML file which you can access here. Note that I have not done any work at all in making this a "nice" HTML file with jumps, pictures, etc. It's just a straight DOC to HTML conversion of the manuscript for the Artificial Life Lab book. The book remains copyright (C) Rudy Rucker 1993, but you have my permission to print yourself out a copy if you can. Any further Xeroxing or copying must not be done without written permission from me.

View Rucker's Artificial Life Lab book about the Boppers Program. Posted March 8, 1998.