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Science

Scientists create digital bug-life 139

Posted by Hemos from the gonna-spark-an-evolution-debate dept.
berniecase wrote to us with coverage of the creation of digital life, in a computer-petri dish. The bugs succed by getting more processing time and thus living more, and reproducing more. This type of experiment has been going on for while, which sparks the debate of digital life? Is it coming? Is it already here? Will it never arrive?
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Scientists create digital bug-life More

Scientists create digital bug-life

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  • The elegance of this is just great:

    "You can see why Microsoft is interested in robust languages because theirs is not," Adami said.

    Tee hee hee!
  • simulations on the creation of actual amino acids in ocean water have been going on for a while now.

    if the scientific fellows figure out how simple life was created initially the rest of the stuff is a piece of cake.
  • I read about a proposed project several years ago that would have done essentially the same thing, but allow the 'bugs' to migrate from computer to computer over the internet, executing on a portable virtual machine.

    It was expected that as CPU usage changed during the day, the bugs would move around the world to the point of lowest usage (greatest resources).

    The idea was to let it run for a very long time, on a lot of computers, and see what sort of bugs were produced.

    I never heard anything more about this. Perhaps the thought of having random code travelling from computer to computer over the Internet did not make it politically feasibile for many to host this experiment.

    -josh
  • Just what we need... Hello World that grows it's own control-C intercept.

    I thought tax time was when Excel DID generate random code that thrived on numbers until the most robust got filed?

    There's just too many one liners waiting in that article.
  • I downloaded life for my palm pilot a few weeks ago, and have been doing similar experiements, man those crazy digital bugs, sometimes they look like a glider and go right across the screen, other times they look like a snowflake, then they just spin over and over. I wish I would have known; I could receive grant money for this.

    It seems that all this really shows is the result of intelligent design in the "bugs", and programming them beforehand with an idea of the rules of their environment. The Morris Worm competed with other programs for processor time too. I guess I just don't see the novelty in this article.
  • I can see why Microsoft is interested, they got plenty of digital bugs to experiment with.

    EJB

  • I'm sick of these AI experiments that pop up now and again. They simply do what they're programmed to do. Tamagotchi's running on pentiums.


    Yawn..........

  • Sure, this is old hat. But its not been done with morphing code before. Previously it was simply a matter of who found CPU time. Here we have "organisms" that when they react properly, recieve more CPU time, thus giving them an even greater chance to do what they ought to in order to survive. As for the old amino acid in ocean water, we would never live long enough to see what really came of an experiment like that. Sure we can see that amino acids. Imagine leaving that stuff locked up in a lab with the proper conditions for a few million years. Someone could open the place up and find "alien" life right here on earth. Seriously though, anyone care to wager what this and the "intuitive" computer could do for AI?

  • Tierra (Score:2)

    by DanaL ( 66515 )
    I was a little disappointed that the authors didn't mention Tierra, the a-life system that Avida was based on. Tierra has been around since the 80s and can be found at: the Tierra homepage [atr.co.jp].

    The programs that evolve in Tierra get pretty interesting, and include the evolution of parasites and virus programs. Pretty neat stuff!


  • has anyone ever used the Tierra artificial life software? I downloaded it years ago; hardly knew what to do with it, as I knew nothing about C.. got it to compile, but it always locked up my 386...

    This article piqued my interest in the software again, and I found some info on it, for those interested...

    links:

    Web page [atr.co.jp]
    FTP Site [santafe.edu]
    Documentation [atr.co.jp]

  • Just Genetic Algorithms (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is old. GA's have been around for years, and are being used in commercial software.

    GP, the "next step" in some ways, is also years old.

    However, it won't replace human programmers anytime soon. Genetic algorithms and genetic programming require a lot of work.

    I'm currently working on a GP system that uses XML to store human readable intermediate results (such as doing dumps of whole genertations), as well as for distribution of individuals for evaluation in huge distributed setups, and it certainly takes time.

    But most importantly: It takes a lot of time to evolve complex systems, and a lot of time to specify a fitness functions that "works". If you aren't precise enough, the system will inherently exploit any weaknesses in your model, and may achieve high fitness values by "cheating" (relying on unintentional quirks in your model).

    This problem grows exponentially with the increasing complexity of the problem you want to solve.

    Some suggested solutions involve using GP/GA's to "police their own". You could for instance conceivably evolve GP's that rate music almost like you. It would take a lot of time for you to put together a training set. But once you've done that, you could use the music rating GA/GP as a fitness function for a music composing GA/GP.

    After a while, components based GA/GP will probably be more popular: To avoid having to expose humans to the evolution all of the time (which is very time consuming), you limit the problem to evolving a decent fitness function.

    In the music composition problem above, it would take you a lot less time to put together a set of examples of music you like and dislike, and evolve a GP/GA that rates them approximately like you, than it would be for you to rate the output of a GA/GP that tries to evolve composition skills from scratch.

    You'd still have to check the results from the composition GA/GP from time to time, but the GA/GP you've evolved to rate music would sort out potentially pleasing music from complete crap.

    GA/GP has a lot of potential. The problem is to find good ways of reducing the time spent on evaluating the programs.

  • Microsoft's been producing digital bugs in all of their software for years :)

  • The strange and scary part of this kind of technology is the word mutations. Mutations are by definition unpredictable. Maybe I've read one too many science fiction novels, but the thought of a totally unpredictable, completely new life form scares me.

    All of the life forms currently on this planet have had millions of years to evolove into a stable relationship of population dynamics. What happens when a brand new life form is thrown into the mix? Will our steady-state system be pushed into an unstable region? What then? If you reward a life form for one particular action without instilling a natural balance between risk and return, that life form could evolove into something frightening very rapidly.

    Hey... I have an idea. Lets make a movie of this... it can star Keanu Reeves because he's such a talanted actor. :)

    --
  • Will it never arrive?

    Well, since it's being developed at Michigan State, the digital representation of life will arrive with about 10,000 others, late at night, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a torch in the other hand. Then, about 30 minutes later into the simulation, digital representations of law enforcement will show up and begin showering the digital life with digital representations of tear gas. The simulation will then go into chaos with the digital life setting fire to the digital law enforcement's vehicles.

    Very realistic :-)
  • Tom Ray did this about 8 years ago. His results were quite spectacular: Tierra's "critters" spontaneously developed self-replication, viruses, predation, symbiosis, and more! Here's a link to the Tierra Homepage [atr.co.jp].
  • tamagotchi's don't adapt themselves until the most robust code wins. and they can't take care of themselves. and they're just "toys," as in, the dinky little toys made to entertain children, or bored high schoolers (as I once was.. bored, that is. still a high schooler.), and they don't feed themselves, and....
  • Heh this is just what we need. Windows 2000(2050?) to spawn and take over computers run by Linux. It's the final step to world domination!!!! So, who is going to develop some digital Raid?
  • Sounds like the "evolution" of windows.... from 3.1 to 95, 98 NT 3.5 to win2k...

    Unix is user friendly... it just chooses friends selectively!!
  • "The proposed project will create a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms (parallel processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to find the natural form of parallel and distributed processes, and will generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware. The project will be funded through the donation of spare CPU cycles from thousands of machines connected to the net, by running the reserve as a low priority background process on participating nodes." (Taken from http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/reserves/node1. html ).

    Tierra http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra/tierra.html really looked awesomely exciting, but it seems to have remained confined to a relatively small group of researchers.

    Avida http://www.krl.caltech.edu/~charles/avida/manual/i ntro.html claims to have taken over the concept, but I miss the distributed computing that Tierra ambitionned.
  • Weird...misread part of Deborah's post, thought that instead of of "population dynamics" she'd written "copulation dynamics"....
  • The thing that struck me after I stopped laughing at that was the following thought: Instead of just a couple of privileged developers at Micros~1 actually understanding how their software works, imagine that *nobody* understands how their software works.

    Still, I suppose that an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of computer keyboards might just do better than Windows. Now *that* I almost believe.

  • What you're talking about is The Tierra Project (I assume). The idea wasn't to let them just run across the internet though. They would travel only to computers that were running the Tierra Virtual Machine, feeding off of unused Processor Cycles. Basically the idea was to let these programs mutate and then "harvest" ones that had mutated usefully to build into software. I never could decide how sound the idea really was but it was pretty cool. http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tier ra/tierra.html [atr.co.jp]
  • I'm sick of these ai experiments called humans. They simply do what they're programmed to do. Tamagotchis running on brains.

  • Now, if I could only see this happening in real life, that would be nice. I'm still waiting for mutations and other life forms to evlove.

    That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
    JM
    Big Brother is watching, vote Libertarian!!

  • This is akin to mathematician-novelist Rucker's concept of "boppers" a-life as I understand it. To see Rucker's home page, follow this link. [sjsu.edu]

  • Artificial Life programs are alot less like "Life" and more like "Core Wars". In the AL projects I've read of the rules for the environment aren't things like "If surrounded by Three Squares do this...". The environment tends to be a more realistic world. And the bugs aren't just better programmed. They are designed to mutate for better or for worse. From there it's Darwinism.

  • There's a very good FAQ about this (Score:3)

    by Kaa ( 21510 ) on Wednesday August 18, 1999 @03:39AM (#1740804) Homepage
    Big, well-written and funny: called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (FAQ in comp.ai.genetic). Here is the relevant extact:

    Obtaining copies of this guide
    This FAQ is available between postings on rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/ai-faq/genet ic/ as the files: part1 to part6. The FAQ may also be retrieved by e-mail from . Send a message to the mail-server with "help" and "index" in the body on separate lines for more information.

    A PostScript version is also available. This looks really crisp (using boldface, italics, etc.), and is available for those who prefer offline reading. Get it from ENCORE (See Q15.3) in file FAQ/hhgtec.ps.gz (the ASCII text versions are in the same directory too). In Germany, its also available from the SyS ftp-server: lumpi.informatik.uni-dortmund.de:/pub/EA/docs/hhgt ec.ps.gz

    ENCORE is a set of FTP sites, including
    ftp://ftp.krl.caltech.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html
    ftp://ftp.cs.wayne.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.htm
    ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html
    and others


    Kaa
  • Only if they use public services. Roads, schools, etc.
  • Has anybody succesfully compiled the source of the Beagle-X11 part of Tierra?

    TIA
    Sendy
  • So is Microsoft giving money to this noble cause because some forward thinking person there thinks open source might stand a chance in the very long run, and that the only way to beat socially evolving programs would be to hit them with human independent genetic programming?

    So we'd be programming against a wave of IMPlike bots spewing new versions of office etc all the time?

    Perhaps open source people will then see the benefits of the biological side of programming, and a whole new chapter of the history of programming will begin.

    Then again, why is MS giving the money over? would there be other reasons? Am I being paranoid?
  • Let's say tie in the training process in a distributed effort? Where everyone has the critter on the screen to interact with when you are really bored according to a bizzare distributed training schedule.

    I wonder how such a multi-parented baby will behave... mmm...
  • Microsoft provided Ofria's mentor, Chris Adami at Caltech and his colleague Richard Lenski of Michigan State University with $50,000 in seed money to steer the project toward the study the evolvability and robustness of computer languages.

    "You can see why Microsoft is interested in robust languages because theirs is not," Adami said.

    Damn....Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Jeez!

    "Why can you randomly change instructions and these things tend to survive?" Adler said. "If you went in and did that with Excel, the results wouldn't be good."

    Yeah! Take another bite of that hand... heh

    Possible applications might include tougher operating systems, programming languages, applications and virtual machines.

    Great. Just what we need....Microsoft Windows with a bad temper. "WHAT? You deleted parts of my REGISTRY? Watch this Blue-Screen, Asshole."

    Or how about a C compiler that decides it wants to play a joke on you, and deletes a block of your code.

    Don't bother fighting them, because the suckers will adapt, or mutate or some crap, and piss you off even more. (I'd hate to see them put that stuff into MS Bob. That would be scary.)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • So will this software be banned in Kansas? Or will A-Life pages just have to put disclaimer on the front page sending people in Kansas to yahoo or something.
  • Still, I suppose that an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of computer keyboards might just do better than Windows. Now *that* I almost believe.

    Isn't that Linux?

    Actually, I've always theorized that Windows is actually a by-product of those monkeys trying to achieve Shakespeare... in that light, Microsoft is a major accomplishment!

  • Don't forget that even the most convoluted and brilliant Life configuration is only a speck next to the obscenely complicated miracle that is human life. We've got a loong way to go.
  • We just have to make sure we don't give them autonomous power. As long as we can pull the plug instantly then we win!

    /me cackles wildly and runs around cutting all of the power cords to save the world

    Kintanon
  • I submitted this a few days ago, with a couple interesting links:

    Here [msu.edu] is the researchers web site.

    and Here [caltech.edu] is a page related to the Nature article which includes source code for the experiments. They ran this on a Linux Beowolf cluster.
  • Do you suppose that the program would crash if you tried to run it in Kansas?

    But seriously, does this thing, when evolving, write new human readable code or new binary code? The idea of software with no source code known to or readable by anybody is more than a little bit troubling.


  • Project Von Neumann [caltech.edu] is apparently some effort to create and artificial life game. Dunno much about it, doesn't look like much coding has been done. Take a look for yourself.
  • "Microsoft impressed with research"

    Welp, I guess we can expect Microsoft Bob 2000: Intelligent Life to be released sometime in 2001!

    :)




    Never underestimate the power of stupidity in large groups
  • What's going to happen when some high school teacher in the great state of Kansas decides to bring this up to his class?

  • is here [msu.edu]. Interestingly, he's a Microbiology, Zoology, and Crop & Soil Sciences professor, and not in the EE [msu.edu] or Computer Science [msu.edu] departments.

    Apparantly, Michigan State [msu.edu] has formed a Computational Biology Group [msu.edu] since I was a student there. The group looks heavily weighted towards natural science types, with only two computer professors, Dr. Pramanik [msu.edu] and Dr. Punch [msu.edu] on board. I learned both classical AI and GAs at MSU from one of Dr. Punch's classes -- he's a very good professor, intelligent, a good teacher, and an all-around nice guy.

  • Thought you could...

  • The last time I tried to compile it I wasn't very knowledgeable in how server/client programs work, and got frustrated in figuring it out. Thus I forgot about it until now...

    I think it's time to rev up gcc and see if I can't get the darned thing to work this time around, now that I not only know how to get client/server programs working, I can code them, too (though not too well :^).

    We'll see how it goes.

  • A long time ago in a far away galaxy I was able to compile Tierra in a Sparc. Never tried the Windows version. The Unix stuff compiled and run fine out of the (then) very long ftp session. Eventually the sysadmin started to pay attention to my use of disk space and cpu cycles and told me to stop. Pity. :)
  • heh, yeah what you said was pretty funny (honestly) in a sarcastic way. but in general, if you just look at what's said there on the main page, it sounds kinda like one of those digital pets. but i know if you read the article, it's much more detailed :)

    ./brm
  • From tiera-3.12 (1992) documentation:
    The C source code creates a virtual computer and its operating system,
    whose architecture has been designed in such a way that the executable
    machine codes are evolvable. This means that the machine code can be
    mutated (by flipping bits at random) or recombined (by swapping
    segments of code between algorithms), and the resulting code remains
    functional enough of the time for natural (or presumably artificial)
    selection to be able to improve the code over time...
  • It generates programs written in assembly, albeit an assembly language that runs on a virtual machine (this prevents nasty things like a mutated program trashing your computer).

    So, it is human readable as far as assembler goes =)


  • When I first saw this article, I intended to post something about Tierra. A very OLD (read: pre-buyout good) Wired magazine ran an article on this once, so I downloaded it and fired it up. I let it run for days and days and days and watched my population go up and down and all that fun stuff. I was really after getting to see the parasites that some Tierra users report (those programs that are so small they can't copy themselves that they "borrow" reproductive code from other entities) but since I didn't know asm, I couldnt tell what was going on. My only advice to prospective Tierra users is that it isn't going to be really helpful/interesting to you people unless you know assembly language!!

    ~GoRK
  • Open source free software does this same 'evolution' in real life. These mini-programs are rewarded by the meta-program with more CPU time - that's just like somebody trying out software and either discarding it (allowing it to die off) or debugging the source and recompiling it (mutating.)

    Think of users modifying source as sort of a nearly continuous trickle of small changes and the developers making changes (adding features, etc.) as sort of a discrete large jump. (I forget the analogous terms in evolutionary theory.)

    The closed source model doesn't allow these small mutations - changes are only made in the large jump fashion, or by products dying because users discard them.

    That's why Microsoft is interested in this. Since they're a closed-source vendor, they want to automate the "many eyes making bugs shallow" part without opening their source.

  • There have been experiments of this type going on for more than a decade, including Darwinist programming whereby certain algorithms that are more efficient survive. Since this is all a digital SIMULATION we must remember Searle's caution about such experiments; a digital simulation of life by AI practitioners or biologists is not life anymore than a digital simulation of a tornado by meteorologists is a tornado. "No funny tag-line
  • LOL... wish I'd thought of it first ;)
  • So how about introducing random mutations to CVS trees used in open source development?

    Or are there other ways of integrating open source and genetic programming?

  • I remember a couple of years ago when all this was just starting, people we getting really crazy results that nobody else could duplicate because these "evolved" programs/bugs come up with weird ways of doing things. They exploit VERY low level stuff (abnormalities in the wiring of the machine they grew on), and can't function at all if they're transplanted to other machines.
  • the avida and tierra projects do not aim at evolving a program for an intended purpose. they try to emulate biological environments, and the interesting thing about it is how and what evolves.

    btw. i totally agree with what you wrote about ga/gp eduacation problems.
  • How do I know you have a consciousness? Prove it.
    *smirk*

    "Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)

  • Consciousness. Intelligence. Those are vaporous concepts.

    Judging by what you've said you're one of those believers of the idea that humans have consciousness and intelligence wheras animals and to a lesser degree ai don't have any?

    To me that's seems like the common ego-boosting stuff which comes from 'evidences' like the fact that the sun revolves around the earth.

    The only definition of consciousness I can come with is something in the line of being conscious about your own unicity. This is really vague, and wrong.. (since you use the same concept of consciousness to explains it)

    anyway to me, "consciousness" is one of the thing you can think you have, but will invariably fail to proove for anyone else. (anyone including animals...)

    Yes I'm quite sure most of my reactions are more due to some programmed (chaotic ok) behaviour than some meta-exo-abstract highlevel concept like "Intelligence"

  • How is this different, other than being able to run in parallel, from the game of Life, that's been around for at *least* a dozen years, and has pllenty of computer simulation versions?

    Or, for that matter, Core Wars, which I've heard about, and I think was around in the *early* seventies, if not earlier.

    Got a *long* way to go to pass the Turing test.

    mark

  • I am not a biological expert, but I am a programmer, and one things annoys me about evolution simulations on a computer. They don't Mean Anything. Scientists/programmers have preconcieved notions about how the process works, and when they write a program to simulate the process, they build their possibly wrong concepts into the program's framework. "What? Nothing's evolving? Must be a logic error - better change the program a little."

    By the time they get the results they expected, their "experiment" is, to a certain extent, meaningless, and I will explain why.

    The very reason for doing an experiment, I thought, is to test your hypothesis in a real-world environment, or one that accurately represents the real world. In a physical experiment, you are running on a code base that is real and infinitely complex: the universe. In a computer simulation, you must start from scratch. If they were able to accurately simulate everything down to the atomic level, they could perhaps approach gettning something like a meaningful conclusion from their "experiments."

    As it is, the scientist/programmer makes a million assumptions in order to run, not an experiment on actual organic matter, but basically a high-level simulation of a list of rules. The list of rules is essentially his hypothesis about evolution. If his rules don't work as expected when run on the computer, he changes them until they do. When they do run, his simulation has not proved anything, only given him an idea of how evolution might work in a ridiculously oversimplified universe.

  • >"Why can you randomly change instructions and
    >these things tend to survive?" Adler said. "If
    >you went in and did that with Excel, the results
    >wouldn't be good."
    >
    >Yeah! Take another bite of that hand... heh
    - but from the original article:
    "Dennis Adler, now on leave from his university relations job with Microsoft "
    Adler is from Microsoft and making the very valid observation that if you screw about with the code of most programs, they would stop working.
  • This has been done before. I've not checked every post here, but in case nobody's given this example, I would strongly recommend checking out the code for "Bugs", which was given in the Scientific American a good few years back.

    "Bugs" was a genetically evolving life-form, where there wasn't any pre-defined "good" or "bad", only genetic traits and an energy level. If the energy level exceeded a certain point, the cell could divide. If it fell to zero, the cell died. The traits defined how the cell moved and responded. These would randomly shift, by a very small amount, with each new generation. The cell picked up food that was randomly scattered throughout the environment the cells lived in. Within a few thousand generations, you saw a massive shift in behaviour, according to the function used for food distribution.

  • The elegance of this is just great: "You can see why Microsoft is interested in robust languages because theirs is not," Adami said.

    Yeah, the elegance of academics slagging their meal-ticket is always a sight to see. What amazing assholes. As though their research was about to produce a more "robust" language for big bad Microsoft... I doubt even MS believes that bull!

    Not that I think the research is useless, far from it, but I don't think they're exactly right around the corner from being able to produce a new strain of Windows that never crashes. Sweet Jesus.

    -sam

  • Re: Darwinism

    The mutation comment is what bothered me about the article. Seems the investigators view mutations as a 'bad' thing. Biologists tend to view mutatation as neither good nor bad but instead regard them as the keys to survival under changing environmental stresses.

    Sometimes the mutations benefit the organism when the environment prefers them, sometimes they end up leading to extinction of the species.
  • It's Tierra not Terra, and they say on the Avida web site that they based their program on the concepts of Tierra...

    Try:

    Avida [caltech.edu]

    Tierra [atr.co.jp]

  • Many have pointed out that this is not new, because there have been already Tierra, Corewars, Life, and so on. Its true that these have been earlier, but that doesn't mean that the avida stuff isn't new. Look at Adami's publications
    (his homepage is http://www.krl.caltech.edu/~adami/ ) or look into his book "Artificial Life", and you will see that he knows all these previous works. The difference with avida is that Adami et al. have done more than just simulations, they have developed *quantitative* mathematical formulations that explain the experiment's observations, and they have shown that they can relate their computer experiments to the evolution of real bakteria (Lenski's work). So with this work the evolution of computer organisms enters a new stage because now it is proven that for certain well chosen experimental setups, the study of digital organsims is equivalent to the study of biological organisms, but of course can be done with a much higher accuracy and much faster.

    By the way the connection to Microsoft is of course the least important aspect of their work. They did this before Microsoft got interested, and they will continue if Microsoft looses interest. Their work is mostly sponsored by the NSF.

    Bye,
    Claus
  • ...back in college, what, '94?

    [geezermode]

    i had this self sustaining GP system wherein a bunch of program-creatures would vie for artificial resources. they could also kill ant eat each other and choose who they wanted to mate with.

    the trickiest part was designing the environment so that they wouldn't breed so much that they consumed their environment in the first dozen steps.

    in one run, there was a bug in the breed function where they could mate with themselves. it wouldn't produce anything. we also had a 'sing' function so that they could perform basic communication. after they 'evolved' for a few hours, we came back to find them all stuck in various corners singing and 'breeding' with themselves.

    [/geezermode]

  • Possibly more important than mutation is genetic crossover, where organisms swap parts of their genome. I've been reading "Artificial Life" by Steven Levy recently, and some of the researchers in his book were able to get the same evolutionary improvements in their creatures with mostly crossover and only a little mutation. In some cases they had mutation turned off all the way and evolution still ground right along. I recommend the book to anyone who's interested in the subject - it makes a great introduction to the topic and covers a lot of ground.

  • I don't expect that they are trying to prove anything about evolution, per se, or really anything about biology either. They are taking a concept, evolution, and applying it to certain problem domain. In this case, it appears to be creating an environment of competing programs....

    I agree that there are instances where the scientist/programmer tries taking something he learns from the program and applying it to the real world, and each instance of that should be properly evaluated and peer-reviewed on an individual basis, to verify that the assumptions are reasonable, that the results are reproducible and the conclusions fit the results. But it is unfair to criticise ALL of that category of experimentation.

    I don't like people taking a specific result and trying to apply it to the real world, WITHOUT REGARD for the assumptions behind the results. I suspect that that happens more often than the scientist/programmer himself overgeneralizing his results.

  • I read R. Penrose not long ago and completely agree that consciousness and intelligence are non-computable properties of our brains ( as well as those of lesser life forms but in lesser degree ). So, all this AI stuff emulating consciousness and intelligence by computable means is complete crap.

    If AI guys are looking for something to do, here is a hint: I would prefer having chip in my brain which allowed me to get rid of calculator or even computer when I do my banking or engaged in similar activities requiring extensive computations rather then some 'bugs' in my computer emulating 'consciousness', 'intelligence', 'life' etc some of which I already have.
  • I asked the author (Thomas S. Ray) this question a few weeks ago, and this is what he told me:

    The network Tierra experiment continues at an R&D level, and the recent publications present results from those experiments. We have not opened it to general participation yet. We have been hindered by bandwidth issues, which should resolve themselves when broadband service becomes widely available. Now we are actively working on moving network Tierra to the Windows platform.
    ...
    For R&D, we are using sites which offer a cluster of computers. At these sites, we have our own login, so that we can freely re-install the software whenever we make changes, which we do all the time.

    So while development is confined to the 'in-crowd' right now, he still intends to open it up for general participation, which I eagerly await. :)

    For one the most recent information see http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/pub s.html [atr.co.jp]
  • I guess it's sort of "reverse-experimentation".

    In normal experiments you make a hypothesis, then see if your outputs map to reality

    I guess in this case, you make your outputs map to reality first, then attempt to make a conclusion. This of course is not preferred because many paths can lead to the correct result, but not every path is the real one. On the other hand, we can't just simulating the entire universe in a computer and wait for the output (whereas we *can* use the entire universe in *actual* experiments).
  • This post puzzled me:

    "Right - So who made the harddrive?

    The falacy is a classic one. They forgot about entropy. These bug forms are able to "reproduce" only along an entropic path. Absent perpetual intervention by some anti-entropic agent, this narrow definition of reproduction leads to extinction."

    Um...do you consider humans to be "alive" and "reproducing". After all, who made the universe? Who made the food we eat? Certainly not ourselves. To reproduce I certainly DO NOT have to recreate the planet and solar system, and...
    Yes, entropy only increases or stays the same. Humans will become extinct one way or another, either via the heat-death of a shrinking universe, or the cold-death of an expanding universe. Does necessary extinction preclude true "life" and "reproduction"?

    "A proper definition of reproduction requires that not only must the bug sustain and reproduce itself, but it must also sustain and reproduce all of the infrastructure upon which it depends for life." and "After it reproduces the hard drive, then it must reproduce the thing that spins the harddrive, and then the power plant... and then all the things upon which the power plant depends to sustain and reproduce itself."

    Well holy crap, I guess I'm never having a kid...I'd have to recreate my house and my job and my planet and my sun and solar system and...

    "In otherwords, their concept of "fittest" is based on a false definition of reproduction, in that they, and Darwin, left out the anti-entropic thing, the moving ether which imparts a counterclockwise spin to electrons, to planets, and to galaxies, and makes the entire universe sing."

    Well I guess humans are not alive then (after all we're just in an entropic universe possibly sheparded by an anti-entropic being right?). Didn't the idea of "ether" become outdated a few centuries ago?

    The last part about the mind of man and God really lost me too...
  • Geee, the good old game of life has really gone a long way...
    -- ----------------------------------------------
    Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
  • Is this is THE stupidest cnn piece I've ever read! or am I missing the point?
    CNN - ms: The idea is you don't need certain chemicals to make life. You just need certain processes," he said. "And these processes live on the hard drive."

    Right - So who made the harddrive?

    Ok, think that over rationally for a second. Who/What made the Earth(Hardrive), can Humans(AI) reporoduce an Earth(Hardrive) at will?
    Does that mean we aren't alive?
    Your argument is flawed.

    Kintanon
  • Mention the word "computer" to a biologist and you're likely to get shipped out with the level 5 biohazard waste. The problem isn't technology but getting biologists to accept even the remotest possibility of a computer entering their wet labs. Every biologist I've encountered who was actually surviving off of biology income hated computers like Dan Quayle.
  • microsoft seems to be taking the next step in bad software design... letting evolution make their products. and this is pretty much what they have done so far; not controlling the development unless it interferes with comptetion.

    microsoft will release microsoft evolution 99, where not even they know what it's supposed to do: maybe they'll say "It takes up cpu cycles... aren't all Good programs supposed to that, this is nothing more than an extension of what we've always done... there's just less cost with this."

  • Hey, you're missing a line! :)

    /* Gold gold gold gold gold gold gold gold gold */

    (Assuming your artificial lifeform is a Discworld Dwarf, that is. :)

  • Hey! That's a thought! Get this life program onto Windows, and ship it there immediately! Maybe we can get Bill Gates excommunicated, or Windows 2000 CD's burned at the stake.
  • Yeah, but those all escaped from the lab and have been infecting computers and computer stores for years. Sadly, therapy is traumatic and no effective vaccine has been found. However, by taking suitable precautions, computers can minimise the risks of infection.
  • Without looking at the actual Tierra code, I long ago wrote a semi-clone of Tierra. It's not as pretty, but it does the same things, and it's pretty fast. (I wrote it to run on Minix. In 128K. It fits in the L2 cache on a modern system.)

    It should be entirely ANSI C, and run on anything from a 16-bit processor w/128K on up. Some of the code is a little amateurish, but it's very portable.

    It's at http://www.tir.com/~sorceror/minev/in dex.html [tir.com].

  • Don't forget about formal methods, and languages like Eiffel that have more robust constructs than C++. I think GA's are good for evolving algorithms that back trucks into loading bays, but will never be used for programming-in-the-large (or the extremely large if you're Microsoft).
  • Um, what you're overlooking is that 'quantum brains' thing Penrose was going on about? uh, he kinda uh made it up.

    Completely.

    Made it up.

    next time listen to what's being said, rather than who's saying it, hth hand vadim.


  • I agree, science is blinded to only see what it is looking for. But I see something really interesting in the discussion of "what they found" here.

    It seems as though that as far as the criteria of selection is met, a certain intelligence can be applied to maximize its survivability.

    Now I bet a perusal of the resultant code finds that the programs still do what they were origionaly designed for, and therfor to some you could say the code is unchanged. But is has in that it meets the criteria better than it did before.

    With this we should learn more about how genetic coding might utilize simular techniques. However to me it points out how even more preposterous life from nothing is. Even here life is formed on the basis of following established laws. Nothing here creates itself, or its own purpose.

    No ones computer accidentaly spawns these programs, even after billions of computing cycles. These programs were created for a purpose (as you point out) and then continue in that purpose being graded by the conditions of their creation. Its almost religious what they found....
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^ ~~^~
  • Well holy crap, I guess I'm never having a kid... I'd have to recreate my house and my job and my planet and my sun and solar system and...

    your thinking too "here and now". Your child will buy a house, and he will get a job to survive. This Anonymous Coward has hit on a key principle that you might misunderstand, but is very fascinating and rings as true.

    What is the element that keeps any mutation from doing any good? Many reproduced mutations do nothing at all, and all the others do harm. Now what about Genetic Engineering? That is a change but one acted on by a anti-entropic force (intelligence). A person learns the laws of the engineering of a plant and intelligently designes a new feature to it.

    The program would halt very soon if it were just left to randomly modify the code. Try writing a self modifying kernel and see how many lock-ups you get. There is a anti-entropic force at work here that is coded into their universe, and our Universe. Evolution and Darwin have failed to point it out or find it themselves. That force especially needs to reproduce life, and the conditions of that life to be "anti-entropic".

    I believe this is what the AC has said. Funny the most correct work on slashdot I've read to date, and its by an AC. Go figure.

    --ps I don't presume to speak for this AC, and could be misunderstanding it myself. But I'd sure like the AC to contact me sometime to find out.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
  • Sounds like Dan Simmon's Hyperion series....
  • A long time ago, I checked out a kind of interesting book by Frank Tipler: The Physics of Immortality [fatbrain.com]. In a nutshell, he proves the existance of god, heaven, hell, and sex in the after-life, following one basic assumption: The brain is a computer, the soul a program.

    The article states: "What we have here is some alien life because it has nothing to do with biochemical life."

    If that's true, then Erwin [userfriendly.org] is just a lucky geek reincarnated on Linux ;-)

  • This would be great for all the people who's idea of IRC conversation is "Wanna cyber?"

    Heh. I like it. A bot that engages in cybersex. Never gets bored with IRC losers and chat-room sex fiends. Up for anything. Available 24-7. Says everything with particular keywords is arousing, erotic, "makes me hot", etc. Everything without those keywords is charming, clever, witty, etc. I reckon this bot would get itself on a lot of "buddy lists".

    Cyber-sluts get ready for some tough competition!
  • Many reproduced mutations do nothing at all, and all the others do harm.

    Sorry, that's just plain wrong. Corrected version follows.

    Many reproduced mutations do harm, some might do nothing at all (that's subject to some debate) and some provide a benefit.

    The ones that provide a benefit may be few and far between, but due to selection pressure, they will eventually become widespread.

    That's how it works with living things, and, if the right selective pressures were applied (f'rinstance, wipe out the code that crashes, locks up, gives errors, etc.) I see no reason that it wouldn't work with digital "life" too.

    It might not be the most efficient way (natural selection isn't either) but it doesn't have to be. It just has to work.

  • Sorry, I have to take issue with that one. I make my living (such as it is) off of biology, and I'm not afraid of the computers.

    And while they're certainly not Slashdotters, the other biologists I work with don't "hate computers like Dan Quayle" (having a tough time parsing this. Does it mean they hate computers in the same way that they hate Dan Quayle? Maybe they hate computers in the same way that Dan Quayle hates computers? Maybe they hate [computers like Dan Quayle], implying that DQ *is* a computer) Typically biologists hate computers when they (the computers) bluescreen, or when they (the biologists) have to learn a new way to do something because there's a new release of the spectrophotometer software, but most of the time they like computers just fine. Computers are just like any other piece of equipment in the lab.
  • Yeah, I know someone who just talked to Conway at a conference. Not only is he alive, he's not even all that old -- in his 50s I think.
  • Am I the only person tired of statements like Adami's (paraphrased) that "writing robust computer programs is nearly impossible"? I'm sure PC users believe this from experience, but there is robust software in the world. Statements like this just lower everybody's expectations for software quality, and make software engineers out to be ineffective and incompetent.
  • That's why Sex is so great. (At least in terms of the spread and change of phenotypes)

    Although in organisms with short genomes and limited populations, genetic crossovers probably won't lead to much change under a harsh environment, because all permutations will eventually be tried.
  • the question, ofcource, is what happens when to sexbots get it going... you might waist a lot of bandwidth....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Take Wine. Now while it may look like Windows it is not

    Why not? what the people making Wine have done, is take the difition of windows, and make somthing that conforms to that definition. Now it is a very long definition, but givien enough time and effort, it could be done. The only diffrence between windows and wine, is that the names are diffrent...

    Don't ever forget, the human brain is a device, no less, and no more. there is no reason that we could not program another device to act like it
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • The ratio of beneficial mutations to non benificial mutations is so small that statisticians would argue it doesn't exist.

    However for my purposes, it is plenty small enough to show that without an anti-entropic agent (as the AC puts it) it would lead to worsening the conditions of life rather than increasing them. Darwin just throws up his hands and says "Natural Selection" is this agent. Its true, but about as useful as saying the cream in side of twinkies is "just born there." Underlying the AC arguements is specificaly that a natural (random, non-intelligent) mechanism is not sufficient to be such an agent. In the experiment Humans were or created the agent.

    There have been many experiments in accelorated mutations in the lab of variously complex organizms (Grasshoppers being about the most complex) and the ratio of good mutations to bad is so low that they have never observed a beneficial mutation. Random mutations have never even produced a "better" bacteria. (This is different than saying they haven't found bacteria that have mutated and are superior.) And it seems the more complex the genetic code, the less likely a beneficial mutation is.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
  • Because I do not in any way benefit from the creation of said school.
    Taxes are inherently wrong. To coerce money from someone in order to pay for something which does not benefit them is commonly known as extortion.

    Am I free, at this moment, to walk into any 'Public' school building in the country, sit down in a class, and participate in it? If not then this is not a Public good. It is a private good subsidized by public funds. I use the roads, I'll gladly pay for their upkeep. I use the telephone system, I'll pay for its upkeep (Which I do, through my phone bill). I do NOT use the public school system, so I shouldn't be paying for it.

    Kintanon
  • It's pretty old. The project you're mentioning was pursued by Thomas Ray in the early 1990s. His rationalization was that there was no way it could cause a widespread crash of all the computers running his simulation because he wrote his evolving code in an interpreted language. He was incapable of grasping the idea that a bug in the interpreter could cause just as much trouble as writing everything in a native language. The upshot is that people would listen to his talk, then politely point out this shortcoming, and then he would call them all fools (he had a bit of an ego problem too).

    Eventually, he got the point...

    The Artificial Life community has been doing this stuff since the 1950s but they didn't call it Artificial Life until the 1980s when they decided that if they gave the field a trendy name, people would notice it.





  • "the rest of the stuff is a piece of cake"

    Um, the technical evolutionary stuff about getting from self-duplicating amino acid chains to elephants and dinosaurs is a piece of cake .. I'm not so sure that explaining the emergence of sentience will necessary follow that easily though.

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