Generative Bridge Design

We wanted to automate part of the bridge generation process. What an experienced engineer can do in three tries, a genetic algorithm can do in 100,000. We’ve built a system to simulate a bridge as a truss structure in real time. It solves indeterminate and determinate truss systems using gradient descent. We’ve built a way to distinguish and sort bridges based on the amount of stress on their beams. We then used this environment to produce thousands of bridges, borrow from the strongest ones, and produce realistic bridge structures at the end of several generations.