Creation: Life And How to Make It

Sue Wilcox has been writing and speaking for years about ALife (Artifical Life), virtual worlds, and other technologies that define (and question) the fringes of life. The seemingly intractable question of whether there can be artificial life doesn't seem to bother Wilcox one whit: she asserts that there can be, and is. Here she reviews a book on making life, but not as we know it. "The author's challenge to himself," she says, "was to make life within a computer, not just unchanging, low-level life, but intelligent life. In this book he describes how to do it from first principles." (Read on for more.)

Creation: Life and How to Make it author Steve Grand pages 224 publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson rating 8.5 reviewer Sue Wilcox ISBN 0-297-64391-6 summary The ideas behind artificial life, explained for a non-expert audience.

If God wrote a book about the way he put the universe together, why the laws of physics were the way they were, how he came to design humans and all the other life forms on Earth, and why they are interdependent with each other and with the planet, it would be a lot like Steve Grand's Creation: Life and how to make it.

Steve is a self confessed digital god -- and he can prove it: there are over a million lifeforms created by him running around in computers all over the world. They live in their own world of Albia within the computer game Creatures. These are not the run-of-the-mill scripted non-player-characters common in computer games. These little creatures aren't simply programmed to behave: their behavior emerges from the way they are. They are artificial life -- ALife.

This is a lightly written but mind-bendingly deep book. When you realize you have been smooth talked into abandoning the last fifty years of AI research and development along with the majority of current thinking on ALife you know the Grand philosophy has gotten into your blood.

Creation isn't just about the inhabitants of a game; it's about existence, the nature of life, and perhaps more important to humans, the nature of intelligence. What is a conscious mind, and can machines have one too?

This is not a book about exactly how to write the code behind Alife; instead it's about how to think about both simulations and actual living organisms, so that there's some point to writing the code.

Explaining how to think about the world, starting with understanding subatomic particles, then moving onto items of greater complexity -- atoms, then molecules, then autocatalytic networks, self-reproducing systems, adaptive systems, intelligence and mind -- is something Steve is very good at. It must come from all the thinking he does. He says that sitting in a darkened silent room and just thinking is one of his favorite occupations. It's left him with an almost Buddhist sense of detachment from reality as most people conceive of the world.

He's pushing for a paradigm shift in our view of reality, and like others before him who've tried that -- Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, and Einstein -- he's finding it hard work standing the world on its head. But as with his predecessors once the ground has moved under your feet the new place you're standing seems completely right and obvious. It's a new way of seeing that is vital to continued progress.

If there has to be a God, I wouldn't mind letting Steve have a go at the job -- as long as he isn't answerable to another marketing department controlling what his creatures look like. Those cutesy Norns -- ugghh!

Comments

Life as a Game.

[Alien54]

I suppose that everyone is going to post up their favorite theory of what life is.

The one that gets my vote is the idea that life is a game because the definition of a game supplies the metarules. Things that you need in things like things you can do, things you cannot do, loopholes to exploit, limitations due to the nature of the game itself, multiple levels of games, games within games, games you do not know about, being someone's pawn, etc.

Then you get into the philosophy of game design. It was an illuminating thought that most people would not like to live in real life that world that is their favorite gaming world. And looking at the games people play, and sometimes trap themselves inside.

The philosophical payoff is knowing what is the price you have to pay to get out of the game or change it if you want, and knowing better the games you are really playing in the first place.

So many problems, so little time

[BillyGoatThree]

1) This is not a book review. We heard nothing about the contents of the book except that they were "mind-bending". So bend our minds a little with some excerpts or paraphrases or something.

2) You twice compare the author to God (including one comparison that compares the book to something God would write)...yet you only give it an 8.5. Surely it would be newsworthy to explain how "God went wrong" and lost 1.5 points.
--

A Matter Of Definitions

[Bowie J. Poag]

Well, I cant say I've read the book, but I can tell you this much -- I once wrote a paper for a Philosophy class I was in that argued that ordinary household thermostats can technically be considered alive, if you agree that the fundemental definition of life is an object that both consumes and produces energy, responds to its environment..The ability to reproduce isn't necessarrilly required -- Life itself could be a dead-end.

If you make the definition intentionally vague, you can fit pretty much any dynamic system under the flag of being "alive"...So be careful when someone tells you that they have a formula for it. Chances are it hangs heavilly on the definition of "alive" to make it work.


Bowie J. Poag

Slashdot Alife

[FTL]

We've all heard of the Turing test (and if you haven't, you're reading the wrong website). I wonder how feasible it would be to pass a "Slashdot test". Write a robot that posts replies to articles on Slashdot. The winner would be the first unaided bot to hit the karma cap.

Anyone know if this has been attempted before? (I'm aware of the First Post scripts; they obviously aren't going to get karma.) If I had some free time (oh I wish) this would definitely be a cool project to undertake.

I wonder if a simple script that ripped unusual words from the article, Google searched for sites with those words, then posted an 'informative' link would work...
--

Desparation is the English Way...

[SimHacker]

Life does not depend on unpredictability. If something's really alive, then it would still be alive whether or not you could completely predict its behavior. The ability to predict the behavior of an organism does not by definition kill it. Life doesn't necessarily depend on randomness, either.

You can totally predict the evolution of Conway's game of Life, and other deterministic cellular automata, given the initial configuration. It's not necessary to solve the halting problem in order to predict the state in the future -- you just execute the completely deterministic rules. Simple. Conway's Life is awkwardly Turing complete, but it's inefficient for the purpose of general computation (much less efficient that a Turing machine). But at least it means that theoretically you could implement a higher level of Conway's Life (or any other computable function) in terms of a lower level Conways' Life implementation, but it would take a whole lot of time and space.

Andy Weunsche at the Santa Fe Institute has come up with a beautiful way to plot out the deterministic state map of any cellular automata rule: it's a colorful branching graphical fish-eye tree representation of the topology of every possible state and transition of a cellular automata rule (the basin of attraction fields).

You can see for yourself how a given cellular automata rule is completely deterministic, by viewing all the possible interconnected states at once. "Garden of Eden" states (that there was no possible way to arrive at through the rule, so they must be original conditions) are drawn at the extreme tips of the branches, that converge into cycles of the basins of attraction (repeating dead-ends where there is now way to break out). This is really wonderful stuff, well worth scrolling through the whole gallery:

http://www.santafe.edu/~wuensch/gallery/ddlab_gall ery.html

On the other hand, the halting problem has to do with one program's ability to predict if another program will halt (not to just simply simulate the program's execution at a higher level: because if the other program doesn't halt, the simulator will never halt either, therefore failing to give the result). It means that there are undecidable questions that a deterministic Turing complete program can't answer: even if the answers are out there somewhere, they just can't be reached by a Turing machine. It also depends on being able to represent any program as data (a number), that can be given to another program as input, which is essential to the Universal Turing Machine in "On Computable Numbers".

The paradox can be demonstrated by asking such a hypothetical program (called "HaltingProblem") to predict whether another subtly (yet insideously) modified version of itself, called "HaltingProblemNot", will halt.

Given a program "HaltingProblem" that attempts to predict if another program halts (taking as input data that program and its inputs), you can always construct another program "HaltingProblemNot" to give it as input, for which it will never be able to give you a correct answer.

"HaltingProblemNot" just has to call the first program "HaltingProblem" as a subroutine, and then it inverts the return value (not just logically, but by halting if it says it won't halt, and infinitely looping if it says it doesn't halt). An obnoxious trick (called diagonalization), but it's proven to work every time. The fatal Achilles' heel of logic -- Godel strikes again.

No matter how cleverly written, the original program "HaltingProblem" is doomed to fail given "HaltingProblemNot" and another program as input, by either looping infinitely or returning the incorrect result.

This does not mean the mind is any more powerful than a Turing machine, nor unpredictable. Nobody really knows for sure. The only thing we know for sure is that there are many things we'll never know.

Gilda Radner summed it up: