Octopus is a plug-in for applying evolutionary principles to parametric design and problem solving. It allows the search for many goals at once, producing a range of optimized trade-off solutions between the extremes of each goal.

Also see octopus.E for custom evolutionary algorithms.

Download the latest version on food4rhino

It is part of a range of tools developed at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Bollinger+Grohmann Engineers.

• search for single goal + diversity of solutions
• search for best trade offs between 2 to X goals
• improve solutions by similarity-goals
• choose preferred solutions during a search
• change objectives during a search
• solutions' 3d models for visual feedback
• recorded history
• save all search data within the Grasshopper document
• save a solution as a Grasshopper State
• export to text or text files

Octopus introduces multiple fitness values to the optimization. The best trade-offs between those objectives are searched, producing a set of possible optimum solutions that ideally reach from one extreme trade-off to the other.

Based on SPEA-2 and HypE from ETH Zürich and David Rutten's Galapagos User Interface. Developed by Robert Vierlinger in cooperation with Christoph Zimmel, karamba3d.com and Bollinger+Grohmann Engineers.

To install:

• Copy the .gha and .dll file into the Grasshopper components folder 
• Right-click the file > Properties > make sure there is no "blocked" text
• Restart Rhino and Grasshopper

Some examples are provided here. 

New commented examples and a brief manual are provided in the download of octopus on food4rhino.