What happens when architecture is left to an AI

As the newsmakers go off on holiday and the silly season gets underway, I thought I share this interesting experimental study by Joel Simon  where he developed a method to  optimise  architectural floorplans from a human centred perspective or in this case an ant perspective. Based on an existing school layout which is probably as inspiring as most school layouts get he used an algorithm to optimise it for walking time, use of hallways etc. Interesting how the computer generated floor plans end up being far more ‘organic’ than their human generated counterparts. One reason is possibly because the algorithm used was based on ant behaviour, then again probably not an unreasonable assumption to model modern education systems. Definitely worth having a look: http://www.joelsimon.net/evo_floorplans.html