Larry Yaeger

Timeline

1. 1950–1972

   Aerospace engineering at Grumman

   Born in 1950, he studies aerospace engineering at Purdue University (B.S.) and the Polytechnic Institute of New York (M.S.). At Grumman Aerospace, he co-develops the Quick three-dimensional geometry modeling system in 1972 and runs some of the first fully three-dimensional hypersonic flow studies over the space shuttle.

2. 1982–1987

   Effects software at Digital Productions

   From 1982 to 1987, he is Director of Software Development at the effects house Digital Productions, where his work on the DP3D rendering software leads to the photo-realistic effects of The Last Starfighter. He also creates the planet Jupiter for 2010 and the flying-owl title sequence of Labyrinth, which wins the NCGA Best Computer Animation award of 1986.

3. 1987–1992

   Polyworld in Apple's Vivarium

   In 1987, he joins Alan Kay's Vivarium Program at Apple Computer, where he extends Terry Sejnowski's NETtalk speech network and designs a computer voice for Koko the gorilla. There he creates PolyWorld, an artificial-life ecology whose organisms evolve neural architectures through mutation, recombination and sexual reproduction, and presents it at the Artificial Life III conference in Santa Fe in 1992. He frames it as an attempt to approach artificial intelligence the way natural intelligence emerged, through the evolution of neural systems in a complex ecology.

4. 1996–1998

   The Newton Print Recognizer

   In Apple's Advanced Technology Group, he is principal author and technical lead of a neural network handwriting recognizer that ships as the Print Recognizer in second-generation Newton PDAs. With Richard Lyon and Brandyn Webb, he describes it in a 1996 NIPS paper and in AI Magazine's Spring 1998 issue. He later ports the recognizer to Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, where it becomes Inkwell.

5. 2004

   Professor at Indiana University

   In 2004, he joins Indiana University's School of Informatics as a professor, arriving from Apple, where he is a Distinguished Scientist. He keeps a one-day-a-week role at Apple on pen, ink and handwriting recognition and becomes a full professor of informatics.

6. 2004–2011

   Evolving neural complexity in Polyworld

   He releases a revived Polyworld as open source on SourceForge in December 2004. In a 2008 Artificial Life XI paper with Virgil Griffith and Olaf Sporns, Polyworld experiments show that, in some conditions, evolution selects for increases in neural complexity in a driven fashion, and he presents the work at London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in July 2008. In spring 2011, he teaches his course Artificial Life as an Approach to Artificial Intelligence.

7. By 2015

   Machine learning at Google

   By 2015, he has returned to industry to develop and deploy applied machine learning at Google in Mountain View, California, where he writes software and creates data optimization algorithms. In May 2015, he gives a lecture series titled Artificial Life as an Approach to Artificial Intelligence, The Director's Cut.

8. As of October 2026

   Retirement in Bloomington

   He is retired and lives back in Bloomington, Indiana. Polyworld, the program he wrote to evolve artificial intelligence through natural selection, remains open source on GitHub, with version 2.6 released in February 2015.