page_title: The Computer Museum, Boston
section_title: The Virtual FishTank (1998)
hierarchical_section_title: The Computer Museum, Boston / Permanent exhibitions / The Virtual FishTank (1998)
caption_attribution_description: English: The Virtual FishTank, 1998, The Computer Museum, Boston
context_page_description: The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts, museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three different locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum. When the Museum closed in 2000, much of its collection was sent to the Computer History Museum in California.
context_section_description: In this 2,200 square-foot virtual undersea world, visitors used interactive stations located in front of a giant projection display to design their own virtual fish, and then release it into the simulated fishtank. Once in the tank, the fish behaved according to the behavioral rules chosen during its design, with surprising results.  Together with a set of interactive stations, the exhibit, created in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab and Nearlife, Inc., aimed to reveal how simple behavioral rules lead to distinctive emergent behavior in complex systems such as traffic flows and city demographic distributions.
caption: The Virtual FishTank, 1998, The Computer Museum, Boston.
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