BrainWorks


BrainWorks was my first effort at a programming environment for animal behavior simulations. It was based (loosely) on Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles, which presents a series of simple creatures. A typical vehicle might have two eye-like sensors, two motors, and a network of neuron-like units connecting them.

BrainWorks allowed the user to construct this neural net through direct manipulation. It was thus a visual programming language, albeit of a limited kind.

BrainWorks was originally written for Symbolics Lisp Machines and was later ported to Macintosh Common Lisp. Unfortunately BrainWorks no longer runs, because MCL has evolved out from under it. It could be made to work again in the current version of MCL with a little work. If you are interested in doing the port, please contact me.