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Virtual Genetic Evolution
Sleeperservice writes "This story at New Scientist describes how, using cell simulation in computers, evolution can be simulated. How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?"
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I'd written an essay on something similar to this, of using DNA Mapping long ago when I'd just started doing AI. You can find the essay here.
/virtual humans/ and so on.
Ofcourse, once you start working on it, you just realise how damn tough it is, and although it sounds easy on paper, it's just not that simple. Simulated environments are just too complex.
And it's also interesting that David Zindell has written some interesting stuff on this in his series Requiem for Homo Sapiens, on simulated
The Simulation Argument
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
Nick Bostrom (2002)
Forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly.
ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Whether or not this is a joke or not, we need a moderation that roughly sums up this: "these exact arguements, and the common rebuttals of them, have been posted on slashdot a million times before, and the discussions that inevitably come from them are both predictable and pointless."
I mean seriously, "Dr." Putting aside ENTIRELY the issue of who's right in this case, you are either extremely ignorant of the wealth of debate on these subjects, or are just being grossly dishonest in simply glossing over it all in order to win cheap converts that you hope wont read or think any further.
If you have any experience with creationist/evolution debates, you would know that all of these arguements have very good rebutals. Regardless of your opinion of these rebutals, the least you could do is address THEM, adding something new and intelligent to the actual living debate, instead of posting the same dumb starting challenges that almost everyone, even most creationists, agree are dishonest and misleading, and at the very least have hashed through a million times before. Or you could link to the hundreds of sites on the web that respond to things like the rotation question, or the question on entropy, and then criticize THEM.
Instead, all you've done here is copy and paste (out of a recent reading of some tract, if not litterally via computer) some of the most well known creationist arguements. You are not surprising anyone with them. They are not new, damning charges against the theory of evolution: most of them were exposed a CENTURY ago, and well refuted even back then. All anyone does by posting them yet again is make modern creationism look stupid. Anyone who can state that evolution violates the second law is completely clueless about the second law (do endothermic chemical reactions violate the second law, going from simple atoms to complex molecules)? There are creationists out there who are at least willing to be honest and reasonable about their critiques: I suggest you join their ranks instead of preaching Hovind.
I had a population of simulated organisms competing in a shared 2d grid for food, which appeared in a pile at a random location when the old food was depleted. While the organism had basic looking/moving operations to rely on, invariably some would discover that with enough organisms, the food moves enough that you can survive by just looking around until the food is in your line of sight, and then jumping on it. My arbitrary decision to place the food randomly formed the basis for an *entire species* of organisms (which didn't fare too well when some got smarter).
These same organisms used a stack to do their thinking. Looking and eating produced values, which could be used for simple branching. Out of sheer laziness, I designed the stack to allow infinite pops off an empty stack which would return false, and infinite pushes on a full stack which would discard the values. One memorable run produced a dominant species which relied on this stack behavior to implement COUNTING! It intentionally (well, purposefully) left crud on the stack in a main loop, relying on the filled-stack behavior to detect a certain number of iterations. The stacksize and the arena size happened to be comparable, and this is how it determined when to turn.