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Digital Life and Evolution
mrivorey writes "Discover Magazine has a story about The Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State University. Scientists there have created virus-like computer programs that replicate, mutate randomly, and compete with each other... in other words, they evolve. Among such feats as learning to add and compare numbers, these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them, by playing dead.
You can download the project yourself from SourceForge." We first mentioned this in early 2003, but it appears to have developed a good deal since then.
The only interesting part that caught my attention is:
"One of the biggest questions in evolution is, why aren't all organisms asexual?" says Adami. Given the obvious inefficiency of sex, evolutionary biologists suspect that it must confer some powerful advantage that makes it so common. But they have yet to come to a consensus about what that advantage is.
I think this built-in inefficiency is to control the population, no? So it's important to introduce the idea of "mating" to virus/robots to keep them under control.
500,000 slashdotters hitting refresh constant-simultaneously is probably still tolerable, how about 4,000,000?
Oh wait... I guess I'm confused between inefficiency and deficiency now.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Dan Simmons included this idea in his Hyperion book series, where evolving digital life spead into the "infosphere" and became artifically intelligent. Later it tried to exploit the human race and wipe out large portions of it. People who download the project beware!
Philosophy.
And few years later, we have synthetics runnin the whole world! Creepy!
Sounds like something my sister would download... ;O
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I wonder how long until the first virus based on this code is released?
"So, mmm-hay, as you can see, I've loaded the evolving virus program onto my wife's Windows computer so that she can experience the evolving and GLAVEN and whatnot for herself. Now, let me just power up the machine and you can see the evolving and surviving and the natural selecting and whatnot for yourself. Brace yourselves, gentlemen."
[[Missing Operating System]]
My wife is going to kill me.
Unknown host pong.
How long after I download this will my computer start threatening to kill me?
If 20 lines .vbs files written by 14 years old script-kiddies are the living hell of windows users, imagine what this evolving viruses would do to them!. ;-)
Think of the children!!!
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
This was done by a team of scientists at the University of Kalisz, Poland in 1997. They developed virtual lifeforms that learned from their experiences. These little "creatues" could talk to eachother and tell eachother important information.
:(
This lead to very strong viruses that actually managed to spead among the Polish universities, over the Internet, in just a few hours from being created. Fortunately, the viruses only ran on PowerPC X/8 (Sun used these heavily in the nineties) processors, so the resulting damage was minimal. Becuase of this, cleaning out affected machines wasn't too hard.
However, if these viruses had been given more time "online", they would definitely have figured out (they tried) the binary format of other (x86, etc) processors and continued to spread. After this incident, that destroyed vast amounts of stundent material, the project was cancelled by the headmaster of the Kalisz university, quite quickly. Would have been interesting to see what this would lead to.
Let's feed them spammers and phishers email and website addresses and let it feed on bandwidth!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Dan Simmons included this idea in his Hyperion book series, where evolving digital life spead into the "infosphere" and became artifically intelligent.
*cough*Wintermute*cough*
You can't take the sky from me...
Sounds like Tierra from the early 1990s, written by Thomas S. Ray. Artificial life, artificial intelligence, evolution, this is trully fascinating stuff. I hate it when so called "creation scientists" jump into threads like this only to force their superstitious mambo jumbo upon our throats saying that digital life couldn't have possibly evolved, it is complex therefore it must have been designed by an intelligent designer. *cough*ockham's*razor*cough*
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Oh God. That was close...
these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them, by playing dead.
Cool! A new excuse... next time someone calls me at 3AM and says one of my programs has died, I'll just tell them it's playing dead and call me in the morning.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
.. one of the best games ever. Digital Life in Creatures. This simulates biochemistry, neural activity, genetics among other this and is great fun.
d ex.php
p hp
http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/creatures_in
Go get yourself a free copy of Docking Station (the online version of this game) for Linux or Windows:
http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/ds/ds_index.
Roman Kennke
Is the digital creationists, who'll tell us that Computer Science is an atheist lie and all programs are created by the Giant Sky Pixie^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H God.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
I'd like to see this run as a distributed computing project, as a sort of race to achieve measurable consciousnessness among the organisms.
Art Schools Dietzilla
Genetic recombination is a powerful concept. It allows genetic lines to "share" advantages, rather than just evolving in a rooted tree. Asexual organisms can't do that.
It's like open source software. Let's say that there's two open source projects that both do the same thing. Well let's say it turns out the market can only support one such open source project, so one of the projects is going to have to fizzle out. But wait, that's not the only option, it's also possible the projects could merge and make a new, third project that takes the best bits of code from the older two projects.
Now let's say there's two software companies that each make a product. Now let's say it turns out the market can only support one such product. The two products can grow on their own, but they can't combine; whichever product is better will survive, the other will die out. What if the product that died had some feature that was really good? Too bad. It's gone forever.
This has been done before, it's been around since at least the mid 1980's possibly earlier - it was caleld Core Wars. This evolved into another similar more advanced version called CRobots... Short programs are written to "attack" the other by overwriting the other's memory space. They must alternate between "defending" their own space and "attacking" the other guys's... First to blow stack loses!
Here's some links:
Corewars:
Home Page
Source Forge Page
CRobots:
CRobots Home Page
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The only sentience that humans have experience with is our own, and I think it is safe to conclude that most scientists working on AI projects would try to replicate human sentience either intentionally or unintentially. Human beings have a very, very robust survival instinct and are extremely destructive when threatened. Do we really want to take the risk that we will create an AI that has our suvival instinct as well as a human-style thought process?
I have caught flak for it in the past, but I have argued for a constitutional amendment banning the U.S. military from employing robotic combat units as anything more than a small minority of our combat forces. The last thing we need is either a weak AI or strong AI being used as the basis for taking over our military and then taking over our country. That's always seemed to be Hollywood's greatest feare. He who controls the AI controls the nation. From Terminator to the Matrix, the dark side of AI has been presented, but how many people don't take it seriously because it's "just a movie?"
I have no problem with limited AI research, but I'll be the first to admit that I am something of a technophobe when it comes to AI. It's simply because of the fact that what we are doing is a playing God with a type of intelligence that is quite suitable for quickly taking total control over our civilization. It makes as much sense to me as putting our worst enemy in charge of our national defense in exchange for a nice chunk of change every month.
This is the classical arrogance. We think that we can control another intelligent being. If we can't control a third world nation that can't possibly wage a real war against us without being obliterated from the face of God's creation within literally a few days if we tried hard, then how can we control a mechanical intelligence that can adapt and grow and potentially learn how to control everything from Wall Street to our strategic defense?
The reason that T3 was so scary to me was that it was the ultimate combination of a rogue AI and grid computing. The only way to stop that new version of skynet would be a scorched Earth policy on our entire electrical grid to power off every node.
And lastly, how on Earth do we expect to negotiate with a hostile AI? What could we possibly offer it except absolute fealty? It has no sensual desires, no use for wealth, only perhaps power over other intellects.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Dan Simmons included this idea in his Hyperion book series, where evolving digital life spead into the "infosphere" and became artifically intelligent. Later it tried to exploit the human race and wipe out large portions of it. People who download the project beware!
_
it really works, try it
Apparently no one here has met Gav or Teri http://www.nukees.com/d/19970917.html
I guess this is the first step to the Matrix. I guess Jessus will become Neo.
Which dimwit modded the parent a troll? The parent references the conclusion of Terminator 3. I saw the connection.
PETDA protesters are currently rushing to surround the offices of Michigan State University and Nintendo.
http://demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/
How we know is more important than what we know.
These "digital life forms" only exist within the confines of the host applicastion. That is their "universe", so I don't think we have to worry about Skynet with this particular program. I do worry about viruses using this methodology, but I don't think they could replicate fast enough to evolve before Symantic and McAfee shut 'em down.
Dude, someone DID design this, and they gave it the ability to change itself, its behavior, and the digital world around it. God created us, and gave us the ability to change ourselves, our behavior, and the world around us. Are you saying that the program wrote itself? That the computer that it is running on just had been running for so long that through those random errors this self-aware program was created? Think about what you say. You just basically said, "I hope nobody points out that I don't know what I'm talking about!" Computer Science does not violate creationism.
...a program that can not only play Mornington Crescent, but can also cheat?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Viruses replicate by taking over the mechanisms of a host cell. They have no ability to replicate on their own.
What these researches have created are "digital organisms" which are intended to emluate cells. They don't need to invade other systems to replicate, but do it on their own within the runtime enviroment the researches set up.
"virus-like computer programs that replicate, mutate randomly ... these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them"
;)
The scientist can hardly kill them, so they are trying to slashdot them?
I seem to be unable to find any source material for this study. I searched for documents coming out of the University of Kalisz from 1997 to date using various keyword approaches and haven't found anything that looks related. Perhaps I'm not choosing my keywords judiciously.
I'm especially interested in tracking down source material on the experiment you describe because of some of the language you're using. In what sense could they "tell" each other information? How did they "try" to figure out the binary format of other processors? And given the results you're describing, why wasn't there any publicity about this event? It seems something likely to make headlines, especially in the kinds of journals I tend to read...
Could you direct me to a link or a reference containing more information about the experiment you are describing, please? It would be greatly appreciated.
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
I just started using this thing, and all of a sudden I heard a quiet "Move zig..." over the speakers....
I'd like to hear how all the defenders of evolution explain this. I consider myself a defender of evolution as well, but I admit I'm bollixed as to why the Golem project seemed to hit a brick wall, not with just one 'species', but with all of them. On the face of it, it would seem to provide some evidence for the Intelligent Design crowd.
[insert obvious Skynet reference here]
Oh yeah, well maybe it's time to get medieval on their asses. Here comes the apocalypse:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
...the girls all had headaches for generations. As usual, the blokes were left to fend for themselves and had to work something out. In the absence of technology to support paracetamol production, this was all they could do.
</deadpan>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I didn't know an abacus could get a virus.
Slashdot has alot of Athiests and smart, critial thinkers.
Yes, apparently.
Check it out. Source available too.
While the "digital life" models may be helpful in visualising what's going on in real life, and in devising experiments to test real life with, the digital environment is about as artificial as it gets.
That said, what the models are showing is that sexual reproduction accumulates changes faster, but does not change the quality of what accumulates. The next step will be to tweak the models even further from reality in order to see them accumulate more advantages than handicaps. Otherwise the results are too depressing.
In analogue life (ironic that digital life should be an analogue of analogue life), genuinely advantageous mutations are collectors items - or would be.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
FACT: Your BSD is dead.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
we got non-believers in Michigan
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Lovelock was hired by NASA in the 60's to begin the process of looking for life on Mars. He concluded that a lifeless planet would have a static environment in equilibrium (or chemical equilibrium), unlike a planet with life which would neither be static or have chemical equilibrium. This seemed to dovetail with the article's " QUESTION #5:WHAT DOES LIFE ONOTHER PLANETS LOOK LIKE?". Readers of evolutionary biology and people who study game theory in economics will probably find much theory in common with the Zimmer article.
One thing we've learned is that life wants to be free and it will find a way and the next thing you know, well, there you go.
Taking a step back, you could view it this way: luxury is the enemy of the human race. The simplest way to gut the reproduction rate of a population is to make them rich.
The Malthusians amongst us may well rejoice, but they would be stupid. The only population groups who will continue to reproduce at high rates are the altrusitic - which basically equates to people who expect the world to end dramaticlly and soon but who are more likely to eschew luxury - and those too culturally retarded to develop enough technology to be able to afford luxuries.
Unless the first group survives the second (unlikely), we as a race are dead.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm probably sounding a little too sci-fi here but how controlled is this "controlled" envivonment. Given enough time can't it evolve past it?
Something closer to the mark would be Tierra developed in the early 90s.
"but it appears to have developed a good deal since then."
err, given the context, shouldnt the proper word be evolved ?
From parent's link: "Tierra is a computer simulation developed by ecologist Thomas S. Ray in the early 1990s in which computer programs compete for central processor unit (CPU) time and access to main memory. The computer programs in Tierra are evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine. Tierra is a frequently cited example of an artificial life model; in the metaphor of the Tierra, the evolvable computer programs can be considered as digital organisms which compete for energy (CPU time) and resources (main memory)...." Read on, interesting stuff, especially because it was written over ten years ago so this program is lightning fast on todays hardware and it's still developed and researched. It's a very mature and stable project. See the home page link on the bottom of the Wikipedia article to read up to date info about this project.
evolutionary biologists have understood sexual reproduction for years. sex increases genetic variation in populations. genetic diversity is important because it helps populations cope with a changing environment. also, it isn't quite correct to call sex inefficient. in nature, asexually reproducing organisms tend to produce much more offspring than sexually reproducing organisms, which negates somewhat their short term energy savings.
...let's look at the list:
Mutant virus? Check.
Plays dead? Check.
Does unexpected things? Check.
Makes errors while copying? Check.
Expands to consume available resources? Check.
Looking good so far.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Record this date if this is the first you've heard of this project. They have unleashed a whirlwind, and we are the dust. I don't necessarily believe that but I enjoyed writing it.
now i won't build, but breed my programs.
AI is not AI, only trying to make a simulation so complex that we cannot predict or easily explain the outcome.
It is embarrassing to think otherwise, but doesn't mean it is redundant.
'leant to add'? I will take that with a pinch of salt. You could have someone 'learn to add' in the sims game, just study, and a +10 will come up above thier head, and a message could say 'learnt to add'.
At what level you say they learnt to add is very important.
I mean:
load ax 10
load bx 10
add bx
isn't exactly learning is it? Were they given a dictionary of instrucitons to assimilate? in a higher language?
oh look, source I can read over on a rainy day, nice!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I would say RTFA:
"Ofria has been finding that digital organisms have a way of outwitting him as well. Not long ago, he decided to see what would happen if he stopped digital organisms from adapting. Whenever an organism mutated, he would run it through a special test to see whether the mutation was beneficial. If it was, he killed the organism off. "You'd think that would turn off any further adaptation," he says. Instead, the digital organisms kept evolving. They learned to process information in new ways and were able to replicate faster. It took a while for Ofria to realize that they had tricked him. They had evolved a way to tell when Ofria was testing them by looking at the numbers he fed them. As soon as they recognized they were being tested, they stopped processing numbers. "If it was a test environment, they said, 'Let's play dead,' " says Ofria. "There's this thing coming to kill them, and so they avoid it and go on with their lives.""
Quite possible that virusses created in this way would eventually 'play dead' to anti-virus software...
RE:these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them, by playing dead.
Hello World!
i thought i killed you
Hello World
die damn you
Hello World
somebody kill me
You get a funny, but isn't something similiar already happening with the proliferation of viruses/spyware/trojans/etc on the Windows platform?
Windows: The ultimate Battlebots proving ground.
Everyone knows that we will eventually build the equipment that creates the Universe. I mean if we didn't then we wouldn't be here so we did right?
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. -- Samuel Butler
Shh.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix.html
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Judging the AI work of 50-100 years from now by today's standards of the state of the art makes as much as judging firearms by the standards of 1700 today. What I am worried about isn't what we deal with today, but what someone might make in 50-100 years from now.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Reminds me of Intelligent Design versus Darwinism. Allow me to yammer on for a bit and I'll explain why:
Evolution did occur (scientific findings are in the latest issue of "Duh" magazine), but the question is how it occured. Darwinism doesn't explain everything as tidily as some may think. ID defender and Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University Michael Behe posturises biochemistry reveals a cellular world of such astonishing complexity and molecules so "precisely tailored" as to make inexplicable by gradual evolution. Only by an intelligent designer, i.e., God could much of this be plausibly explained. Behe goes on to say some systems can't be produced by natural selection because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional." Heavy stuff, but relative to this virus-like digital life. This is a good example of how God could've started the evolutionary ball rolling.
Darwinism and Creationism are not mutually exclusive. Our Heavenly Father could very well have used the evolutionary mechanism to bring about ideal living conditions for Adam and Eve, as well as help them and their offspring be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28), or, as Slashdot puts it, "replicate, mutate randomly, and compete with each other".
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
This reminds me of the "Progranisms" project I saw over on the Gentoo Linux forums:
i ght-progranism.html
r anism-neilh.c r anism-neilh-condensed.c
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-255505-highl
http://www.progranism.com/
Basically some guy put together an executable which makes a few (mutated) copies of itself when it runs, then executes those copies after a short delay. The idea is that executables might evolve which show interesting behaviors.
You can download his source code here:
http://www.progranism.com/junk/progranism-2.3.1.c
Because I like doing strange things, I made a variant of the program which mutates the source code and recompiles it (mutating until it gets something compilable), rather than mutating the executable directly:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/prog
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/prog
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/ (some cleanup and maintenance scripts)
Unfortunately, it's stuck in a pretty steep local minima -- it makes some trivial mutations, but nothing major. One interesting possibility would be to have it search your hard drive for other executables and source files, and try to "mate" with those.
Another scary possibility would be to have viruses/worms with non-trivial evolution capabilities. That'd be a pretty nasty outbreak to try to control.
Finally, a rather neat-looking project is AI.Planet, which is trying to create an 3D evolving ecosystem/world of intelligent "organisms." Framsticks, a 3D life simulation project, is also pretty cool.
"The jump between microevolution and macroevolution is where most evolutionary biologists and creation "scientists" split, i.e., the latter think it's impossible for one species to evolve into another."
Similiar to the "jump" between Quantum Mechanics and Traditional Newton Mechanics.
Tom Ray's Tierra
Thanks for telling me about this.
You can't take the sky from me...
The author Creatures, Steve Grand wrote a decent book about digital life called CREATION: Life and How to make it. Its a pretty good read and has quite a few references to and accounts of the development of creatures.
ie. The Avida organisms would evolve not as i386 organisms, but as Avida organisms that are rewarded for producing i386 code that gains them more CPU/Memory time/space to reproduce.
A book ahead of its time. A college slacker reads his computer science book and a gaming book. He then writes a paranoid program that roams modem-networked computers and leaves copies of itself .
Good find in used bookstores. Canadian made-for-TV movie "Hide and Seek."
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
I guess one nice thing about open source software is that even those who disagree with you can help you. :)
From the article:
When the Avida team published their first results on the evolution of complexity in 2003, they were inundated with e-mails from creationists. Their work hit a nerve in the antievolution movement and hit it hard. A popular claim of creationists is that life shows signs of intelligent design, especially in its complexity. They argue that complex things could never have evolved, because they don't work unless all their parts are in place. But as Adami points out, if creationists were right, then Avida wouldn't be able to produce complex digital organisms. A digital organism may use 19 or more simple routines in order to carry out the equals operation. If you delete any of the routines, it can't do the job. "What we show is that there are irreducibly complex things and they can evolve," says Adami.
The Avida team makes their software freely available on the Internet, and creationists have downloaded it over and over again in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. While they've uncovered a few minor glitches, Ofria says they have yet to find anything serious. "We literally have an army of thousands of unpaid bug testers," he says. "What more could you want?"
The original idea of a evolving computer programs was proposed by Thomas Ray in the early 90's. Check his program http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/tierra/ Tierra . Many ideas in AVIDA could be traced back to it.
"...it appears to have developed a good deal since then."
Hmm. People wrote the software. Should we call software developers "evolvers" instead?
Indeed, asexual duds can't get screwed by definition.
On a serious note, I theorize that sex may be useful in "stabilizing" a species identity.
Asexual reproduction can get anywhere... eventually producing different species from identical individuals after thousands of years.
Sex, OTOH, means a decisive test of compliance: an individual must be "acceptable" enough to be able to mate.
It is ironic that, because there is a choice of partners, cultural factors might play a role in human evolution. The other day (actually some years ago), I read about people worrying about blondes disappearing...
Jordan Pollack's DEMO (Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization) Lab at Brandeis also has a bunch of other really cool projects using evolutionary algorithms:
* Evolution of robot designs
* Evolution of walking gaits for an AIBO
* Evolving LEGO designs, like cranes, bridges, and tables
* Evolution of neural controllers
and combining opinions, I got the following conclusion:
asexual have better efficiency (only require one organism) while sexual reproduction have larger diversity.
Under small population, asexual dominate due to it mutate better while sexual reproduction, even thought it gives more changes to genes, are inefficient.
However in large population, the efficiency of sexual reproduction increases due to the higher population density (higher chance to find a partner) thus efficiency are less of an issue. This lead to sexual reproduction dominate since it gives more changes to genes.
Even though it might bring along both good and bad genes, there are competitions which bring down those bad genes significantly.
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
From the article: "If digital organisms cooperate, Ofria thinks it may be possible to get them working together to solve real-world computing problems in the same way Myxococcus swarms attack their prey. "I think we'll be able to solve much more complex problems, because we won't have to know how to break them down. The organisms will have to figure it out for themselves," says Ofria. "We could really change the face of a lot of computing.""
It seems to me that this claim could never be fulfilled. Even if computer organisms could figure out how to break down problems, Amdahl's law (A program can only broken down up to the point that it is serial) will still hold, resulting in problem solving power no more efficient than the multiple CPU computing that exists today.
"Kaylee, that's the buffet bar." "But how can we be sure unless we question it?"
Check out http://www.theshrubbery.com/udn/
These guys say it was designed!!
Only not very well.
Sexually reproduced potatoes (ie those from the potato seeds) are generally very poor in quality and quantity.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A software program called Avida allows researchers to track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a computer screen like waterfalls.
Am I the only one who noticed that this program seems to be exactly like the matrix? I mean, is this some kind of joke? They intentionally designed a life simulating program to display output in the form of endlessly scrolling columns of data. I can't imagine how that format is more useful than something more standard. Why not output the data into an indexed database? Why not have a visual form that displays real time stats on the digital organisms? I can't see any reason for doing it this way other than "ooh, we want it to be like the matrix, won't that be super cool?"
First Cisco and now this?
Creative Demolition
.. a beowulf cluster of Asimo, Qrio and Aibo attack bots running the latest Quake 3 Avida mod
I have some time, let me count the dumb things in your comment...
1. Altruism is correlated with reproduction? WTF? By Darwinian standards, reproduction is the ultimate selfish act - one aimed at getting your genes access to more resources. On a social level, you will find the countries with the highest birth rate are the ones where having more children increases your chance for survival and wealth. In countries with a proper retirement system and health care, the selfish reasons for having children are minimized. Guess what: That's why the Europeans and the Japanese are having so few children.
2. Why do you think that people who expect the world to end will "eschew luxury"? Wouldn't they instead be maxing out their credit cards, screwing in bathhouses and living it up? Anyway, why would people who expect the the world to end be having children? Wait, is it because they're altruistic and like to see their children die? I see.
3. ... Oh, forget it, I'm bored with your stupid post. Just one more thing about the atheism comment: I don't think atheists are more selfish than anyone else. They do tend to have fewer children than the average, but not when you adjust for income and education. You see, atheists are on average far more educated and wealthy than others, and all such people, atheists or not, have fewer children. (Again, this is because such people lack the selfish reason to reproduce, since their long-term comfort is assured even without children.)
Offhand, it occurs to me that parasites (virii, bacteria, protozoa) have a special environment that may lend itself to asexual reproduction. They have limited movement in their environment; they have particular chemical wars they're constantly fighting; they fool the host body into doing things to help them. Perhaps sexual reproduction doesn't work very well with one or more of the constraints they live under. Well, virii probably don't really fall into this category. I think they're asexual by their RNA nature.
;-)
In particular, the lack of freedom of motion seems like it would be bad for sexual reproduction. It would be easy to get a restricted local breeding population that would result in frequent reinforcement of bad recessives.
The benefit of sexual reproduction seems obvious to me... a gene that is good for the organism under rare environmental conditions can be recessive and rare. That way it can continue to live in a population without expressing during the times that it isn't useful, and then when it's needed there are a few individuals expressing it who can survive the unorthodox environment. This would be useful for getting through ice ages, periodic invasion by some kind of disease, etc.
I'm not sure how asexual reproduction could provide this.
Of course, I'm no biologist - my degree is in physics & math. I read "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, though
...helps lead to a cooperative society, ie, "civilization". If we reproduced asexually no one would give anyone else the time of day let alone cooperate in much of anything, and we most likely would still be arguing over *tasty* carrion chunks as the height of our daily activities. ..oh wait, that IS what we do...never mind...
"these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them"
Imagine the video games that could come out of this?
Doesn't this prove that evolution exists? I'm not talking about the theory that WE evolved, but the fact that things evolve?
Most people don't distingush the 2 concepts, and they just say that they don't believe in evolution, but they don't really know what evolution is, and that there are multiple types.
I like to show that our evolution is very possible based on the fact that things DO evolve, and it would be unlikely that we are an exception to that process.
Wow, this thing must be evolving quickly, it just figured out how to spread to thousands of slashdotters' computers...
This is no news in the AI community, algorithms such as GA's long ago learned how to add numbers, etc. I won't even go into detail here as I assume most readers are aware of this
This story is merely a case of someone who is excited about their work explaining it to an author who doesn't know as much about the subject matter. The author then turns around and writes a story for the lay-person who is not versed in the field. These people in turn jump to humorous conclusions.
This is a common occurance in magazines such as Discover and Popular Science, as much as I enjoy them. A good example is stories on robots, such as Honda's ASIMO. People see ASIMO do amazing things and assume that in 10-15 years we will have these robots in our homes. What the articles often fail to mention is that while ASIMO can do complex tasks, it has very limited ability to recognize a situation, such as a staircase in front of it, and decide on a course of action to take, such as executing its stair climbing procedure.
The true point of the article is that AI algorithms can teach us things about evolution. To make grand jumps and assume that these programs are even in the same playing field as SkyNet or the Matrix is to miss the main point.
As I said above, this is merely the case of a complex subject being explained in a way that is easy to digest for the masses. Even someone who had only taken a few graduate AI courses would find that many misguided statements are made in the article.
at least ten years old? shouldn't be news for nerds any longer
www.genetic-programming.com is koza's site, not that i think his work justifies his assumed superiority over other work at the time...but probably the canonical reference.
in particular he had good success breeding programs to work in a particular domain (world), but they never generalized well.
Literary license by which:
The attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to nonhuman organisms or inanimate objects.
Most often utilized by poets and salesmen.
Subject was supposed to read ...
"Abstraction" in other words "anthropomorphism".
Besides of the fact that their is a great genetical mix, it are also mostly the genes from the alfa male or healthy enimals/plants. others don't have the change to reproduce. This also enhances evolution.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
As far as I know
The females are mainly the reproducing factor.
(actualy it takes two) Also dividing the specy in half is also not fair. Many species consist of only a few males and a lot of females (paradise). Some species adapt themselves to the need (more or less males), some even switch gender in their lifespan if the need arises.
greets John
keep up the good work
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
Try a Matrix analogy.
>> Heavy stuff
:P
> I would have said "deep".
Doc: "There's that word again, heavy. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?"
Sorry, had to do it
Just a few thoughts after reading this story, dont get technical on me if you reply to it :S..
Im sure something is being developed by the U.S Government, technology and information is an important weapon... and i'm sure they want to cover ever possible way to create, destroy, steal and control it!
another thought...
Personally I agree that we will get to the point where the speed of computers will peak under current tecnology used. I'm sure there will be a Ureka monment that will totally change computers as we know them today, but maybe a radical change in the way "software" (as we know it) is made may help.
This concept of an evolving a.i could be used to develop or be incorporated into software to make it more effient at the task it is used for, no more patches and updates... It could even be used as in it's viral form as the next antivirus, but theres a whole bunch of what ifs you could come up with when its deicides to go awol.
They'd probably get dirty and teach them to kill the competitor version...
The only mutations ever observed outside the labe are those which destroy information. In other words, no change to an organism has ever been observed which improves an organism other than in the adaptation (micro evolution) sense.
The Tierra project has been around for many years, but seems to be pretty slow moving. It works in a somewhat similar fashion, but has its issues, such as only really optimising for reproduction speed (which is correlated with small size), and so you miss some potentially interesting results as the system tends away from complexity.
A friend and I have been talking about writing something that will use some of the ideas from this system, and a bunch of our own, but haven't really gotten very far yet, aside from writing some notes and some prototype code.
Here's the latest story from today in the New Zealand Herald.
In a story about middle ear bones "evolving twice", a scientist expressed the following scientific theory, probably accompanied by much hand waving:
"At some stage in evolution they "floated" off and formed a separate organ - the ear. "
can these creatures play dead?
You may check for this http://critticall.com/ also. You may actually evolve (faster and/or shorter) algorithms out of already known with that tool.
This was in Discover magazine in late 2004. I guess it technically qualifies as news, assuming you forgot/don't read other news sources... or don't mind 3 month old stories.
I will sacrafice karma for the better good.
I first stumbled on this over ten years ago.
http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/tierra/
Let me get this straight. You, the scientists who created "viruses" that can become intelligent and nigh-unkillable, want me, and 1,000,000 computer geeks, to download and run said viruses?
Yeah, I've seen one too many Outer Limits to fall for that one...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
That's one way to get it out the door faster!
Look for 'Digital Creationism' - coming to the church near you.
Wonder what sort of effect this'll have on antiviruses.
Ahem. Peoples views differ on that.
this makes them extraordianerily hard to study outside their optimal environment. All that was being said, is that scientist have yet to 'see' Giardia do the sex thing. It doesn't mean that it doesn't happen; but there is now a genetic clue that it does. We just don't have the right tools to disprove the notion. Nerds need better cameras to get their Giardia Pr0n
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
I suppose I'm supposed to fill in your argument for you and believe Lamark just "took apart" creationsim. I can certainly stomach much of his work better than I can stomach Origin of the Species, but he was no more a geologist than Darwin. Last I checked geology had also flatly disproved Darwinian "slow change" evolution within the last 50 years, and the scientific community at large was still in an uproar coming up with theories like punctuated equilibrium and trying to figure out what we know, and what we should probably admit we don't know...
Personally I fail to see what Darwin has to do with simulating genetic mutation on a computer. (A geneticist he certainly wasn't, and the selection can hardly be called "natural") Come to think of it, I've still yet to hear a useful definition of Natural Selection (ie: One other than "everything we know about science, modified daily to make sure the Great Theory can never be disproven").
As to ripping on Creationists or Darwinians as a group... Sorry, I prefer to let someone prove they have an individual ID 10 T problem rather than assuming one based on their worldview.
> Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world.
Maybe if you pull your head out of the sand you can see a bit of a point here?
no... no text, i'm too lazy to write anything here.
Feb 14 09:48:15 gw kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:09.0: irq 10, io base 0x6400
Feb 14 09:48:15 gw kernel: uhci_hcd 0000:00:09.0: new USB bus registered
Feb 14 09:48:15 gw kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found
Feb 14 09:48:15 gw kernel: hub 2-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
Feb 14 10:03:46 gw -- MARK --
Feb 14 10:13:43 gw kernel: We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
Feb 14 10:18:21 gw -- MARK --
Should I start worring?
If you believe in God, I'm not sure why you're trying to enter into rational debate with people who don't believe in your god. You can argue rationally with people who accept that axiom, but not with others.
The concept of 'God' as I understand it allows your belief system to adapt to any eventually, as God is omnipotent - he could have done *anything* if you accept his existence. Using a prime mover as one of your axioms renders any further debate superfluous because he can at any time be used as a get-out clause, eg I don't know why the earth exists, but God is there so he must have done it, the rest I can explain with evolution. This doesn't explain anything at all.
To someone who doesn't accept the belief in God as given, this argument is baseless.
Nice point!
There were some people who used genetic algorithms and "evolved" their programs (usually started with ones they hand-coded). Course, this may not have happened till the late 90's or so. (At least that's when I first recall reading about it, about the time that guy evolved an FPGA that could tell yes/no phrases with no external hardware...)
Ah yes, all these little files full of data. Just like little animals and those numbers! So lifelike. I could have sworn one of them winked at me.
Exactly my first impression. I thought that this research must be not interesting at all because there is no reference to Tierra, but fortunately I was proved wrong. It turns out that the only people who are ignorant of Tierra are the story submitter, editor and the author of the linked article. As soon as you find the website of this project (not directly linked in the story) and click the first link called Introduction and Background you will read five paragraphs about the Tierra project as well as information about even earlier research based on Core Wars called Core World, in the section History of digital life, which I will take the liberty to quote here:
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
No doubt that all man-made artifacts have an intelligent designer, but at the same time, it would be totally impossible for an intelligent human being to design any of the things you mention from scratch, without a lengthy history of very similar designs and implementations preceding it. The chair
I sit in has a *thousand* intelligent designers! My computer has even more.
Computers and chairs have evolved through a tril-and-error process; if they didn't evolve, they would not exist today.
This goes to show that "pure" design, a specification of a chair or a computer, without a trial-and-error process to determine what works well and what does well among users, is only a small aspect of the development process of chairs, computers, or anything else made by man.
So even for artefacts for which intelligent design is clearly an important and possibly necessary factor in their creation, the development process of such artefacts in the long term is evolution. (Not: looks like evolution. It is the same process. The difference is that it doesn't operate on living beings, it doesn't work with genes.)
While I agree with you that the chances of life forming out of primordial soup seem pretty slim, I think you are totally mistaken about the relationship between intelligent design and evolutionary processes.
You might like reading Michael Crichton's novel Prey.
I don't think it will have the capability of emotional joy in threatening you, so it will just kill you I guess.
The overwhelming complexity of living systems is evidence that they are NOT intelligently designed.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
The Artificial Life game Creatures had "Norns" which also exhibited unusual and unexpected behaviors.
And by the way, Darwin himself, at the end of his life, denied evolution as the explanation for how we got here.
No, he didn't.
And even if he had, what difference would it make? Evolution is a fact, not Darwin's opinion.
If Einstein had renounced his theories on his deathbed would relativity be any less true?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Someone DESIGNED a system to prove evolution.
Beyond that, it would be interesting to look at the details of how this works. Does it mimic UV light and other things trying to break down early life? Is the mutation rate random?
It may not prove evolution, but it is an interesting experiment.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It amazes me how quickly this update of "life" "devolved" (yes, pun intended) into another evolution argument.
This is an interesting pastime, but anyone who thinks it will prove/disprove evolution or even the possibility of evolution is just buying from the wrong dealer.
Computers simply yield the output of a selected input through a predetermined set of steps or rules. If they don't give you the result you expected at the start, you screwed up the progam or you were wrong about the expected product, but the program gave you exactly what you predetermined in the code (and that includes self modifying or "evolving" code, which works also by its' own rule set).
The best a computer simulation can do is validate what you expect as you design it. The outcome of this simulation will tell you more about the code writers than the real world.
Honestly, as technically astute as the readers here are this whole discussion just proves the contention that both theistic creationism and evolution are held on the same plane of pure faith, grabbing for validation for their interpretation of evidence.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
If you read your sacred books, you will see that God is defined as an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent entity...
There is only one thing that matches this definition! It is "Universal Darwinism" also known as evolution. Especially when you read Dawkins and Koza you realize that evolution knows everything, can do everything and is everywhere when you look at it as a whole.
Also it is interesting to note that most of the anti-evolutions people in the USA are extremists, ignorants or both. The vatican and most muslim imams have already integrated evolution in their dogma and accept evolution as a fact.
Read your bible again and replace every occurence of god with evolution; it will be a funnier read.
Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is Evolution when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
You should read The Selfish Gene & The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins, The Meme machine by Susan Blackmore, The Koza books on Genetic Programming and Matt Ridley's Genome.
gaius muhammad
Wyrm by Mark Fabi Fictional self-mutating virus interlinked with computer gaming. Amazon.com has a much better review. It was an excellent read.
...or is it just *playing* dead?
AFAICT, at this point the system is treating food (numbers that can be added) and code (the instructions the organisms are made of) as distinct kinds of matter. How about instead of just feeding numbers into the system, postulate that code, food and maybe processor time (energy?) can be traded/transformed into each other, and are conserved at some level - e.g. a "dead" organism can serve as a food source for another.
We could see the emergence of new behavioral patterns - predators, carrion eaters, parasites, and God knows what else.
We fetch your mail, we route your packets, we guard you while you surf. Don't fuck with us.
This post contains material on digital evolution. Digital evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of digital living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.
Required reading for internet skeptics
#> while true
#> kill -9 666
#> done &
Without having looked at any real depth at the research, can someone explain to me how this is different than all other "genetic algorithms/programming" research that's been done for years now?
I feel like I'm missing something...but it isn't apparently obvious.
Marching Morons is a real problem, and oddly enough natural selection is its right-hand man.
There ain't no God gene.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...but it is the exception, not the rule, and the rule is what dominates.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And the rest of your arguments fall apart along similar lines.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that there are far more destructive mutations than anything which can possibly be interpreted as constructive, and they accumulate almost as readily. Natural selection is no magic wand.
Since we are accumulating malfunctions far faster than useful functions (if indeed we are accumulating useful functions), we're all eventually doomed. This is a mechanism to destroy, not to produce.
This is indeed descent, but not after the fashion imagined by Erasmus Darwin or his grandson.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Pie in the sky when you die is conditional on good behaviour here on Earth. A deist who is both stupid and greedy will want that pie and will practice altrustic behaviour in order to obtain it. In other words, greed actually leads to charity.
I say stupid and greedy because doing the charitable deeds is not the point. That would only be delayed gratification, a demonstration of strong will rather than good character.
The point is to become the kind of person who naturally does charitable deeds, for a 100% altruistic 100% of the time society is the best of all possible worlds. In Christian theology, you will be rewarded not for the sheer scope of your deeds, but for what you did from the heart with what you had. You go to Heaven by being suitable for Heaven rather than by racking up brownie points. In that case, good character leads to charity.
Since there is no totting up at the end of the day, for an Atheist, there are no consequences beyond the immediate, or as Louis XV was said to have so elegantly put it, "apres moi, le deluge". Charity does make sense in the overall situation, but it's not what individuals actually choose in practice if left to themselves.
The distiniction is kind of blurred in Western society, because we're raised in a more-or-less Christian milieu. Our basic working assumptions descend from Protestantism with a dash of random Deism.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
As I said, selection is not a magic wand. If it was, it would be teleological in effect and all claims to Materialism and Atheism would vanish with its discovery.Yup, most certainly is. Many of them in fact.
Two things worth noting about them are that they're not perfect, and that they correct all mutations - good, bad or indifferent.Natural selection alone. Some bacteria already had this capability, and survived exposure to the "alien" environment.
If you slowly reintroduced the population to more natural conditions, they would gradually revert until they were essentially as before - unless some necessary survival attribute was selected out completely. Darwin Finches have been observed to do exactly the same thing. No new information, just reapportioning existing codings at need. Bacteria in particular use a technique called conjugation to "pre-adapt" newcomers to their community.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Some bacteria already had this capability, and survived exposure to the "alien" environment.
Interesting theory, but wrong.
How did the bacteria (of the same species) get different genomes in the first place, if not for persistent mutations? If your theory that mutations are overwhelmingly bad was true, wouldn't they all have their original divinely-specified genome?
Why was the capability to metabolize man-made chemicals hanging around at all? Wouldn't it have degraded through genetic drift in the billions of previous generations?
It can be experimentally demonstrated that increasing the mutation rate also increases the adaptation rate to the new environment. It can also be demonstrated that the adapted bacteria have new genetic material, which could only have arisen from mutations. From these and other observations we can conclude that mutation is at least one important factor in adaptation. (Or maybe god reached in and fiddled with it with teeny tweezers just to confuse the scientists; without naturalism we can't rule that out.)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Please try to pay attention: If the adaptation was solely from selection of existing genes, then increasing the mutation rate would not increase the adaptation rate.
If the so-called "decay" of genes in bacteria leading to diversity makes it easier for them to adapt and survive in a new environment, then it is in fact beneficial mutation.
This is not speculation about billions of years ago; it's something you can observe in a highschool science lab. What's next? Are electrons unbiblical? Back to four elements?
If you want to believe in myths, just do it and don't try pretend there is any scientific evidence.
A critter is more than genes. There are also mechanisms to manipulate those genes, the most obvious ones being the transcription checking and stuff, and a whole pile of other mechanism which arrives along with the nice neat little package of DNA.
You are not necessarily bringing the adaptation about through mutation. You are simply increasing the rate at which chemical change takes place, regardless of the mechanism.
Four elements is not Biblical, it's druidism (and in the Orient, it's five elements anyway). If you want to talk about mythology, let's talk about pangenes, spontaneous generation, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and teleomers.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If the mutations it's producing are random, then why is the outcome always the same? And if the results are consistently the same, is it really due to a mutation, or to a pre-existing defence mechanism deliberately substituting a different genetic value in order to protect the organism, or at least its descendents?
If you put me under more UV light, say by shipping me to Fiji and forcing me to work outdoors, I would automatically protect myself using a different mechanism: my skin would get darker, not more transparent. Eventually, my descendents would have noticeably darker skin than I - not because of any mutation, but because of a pre-programmed adaptation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Think for a moment: the behaviour of any particular molecule is not predictable, and yet we can predict the outcome of chemical experiments and draw solid conclusions about what is happening at the molecular level. Similarly with electrons or photons or what have you.
We cannot predict which individual bacteria will mutate, or how, or which ones will reproduce, but over hundreds of generations of millions of cells the result is deterministic. Perhaps 99.999999% of the mutations are bad, but the one bacteria that gets lucky will reproduce again and again until its children fill the whole slide. And so on and on, incredibly wasteful in one sense but nevertheless making progress. Obviously if you blast it hard enough you'll just kill them all, but that's boring and unrepresentative (at least until WW III.) The very fact that bad mutations do not get reproduced acts as the feedback mechanism.
We can tell that the result is due to a mutation for several reasons. Firstly, we can directly sequence the DNA and observe new patterns do exist in the succesful bacteria -- new information *was* created. Secondly, we can observe that the change persists even generations later, when the selective pressure is removed. Something is being passed through the generations that carries the information. (This was known to occur well before we knew that DNA was the (main) carrier.) In human terms: black people's children remain black even when they move to a cold climate; Irish-Australians remain prone to sunburn.
If it were a pre-programmed adaption turned on in response to the climate, it would not propagate through generations. Children of suntanned people are not born suntanned, and will never get suntanned unless they go out in the sun themselves. (They might have inherited a tendency to tan, or perhaps even a preference for sunny climes or outdoor work. Distinguishing different effects can be hard.)
Given enough time, skin cancer might well kill off all the Australians who are genetically prone to it, leaving only dark-skinned residents well adapted to the climate. This might take many generations, certainly more than the few dozens we can directly trace for humans. And of course given mixing through migration, and some ability to treat cancer, the effect might be hard to detect even then.
But you may say: well, this is just selection, not mutation. And indeed it probably is: mutation rates are rather lower in humans than bacteria, partly because humans have far fewer offspring and so can't afford to take big chances. (But why is the rate different? Because by evolving or relaxing checking techniques, species can tune their frequency of mutation and make themselves more safe or more adaptable.)
But it is selection of variations that originate in mutations: the first redhead was probably a freak, but it's harmless enough that they lived and reproduced, until now the gene is widespread in western populations, and common in some areas.
Mutations in humans have been directly observed -- genes present in parents and children but not grandparents.
Some people are apparently naturally resistant to HIV; this probably began as a mutation, but (at least in the absence of medicine) that mutation would be incredibly beneficial and generations later everyone missing it might well have died out.
We use bacteria/yeasts/fruitflies for experiments for several reasons, aside from the obvious ethical one: because they mutate more easily and reproduce far faster and more numerously, we can watch the whole thing on fast forward. It may be hard to predict what happens to humans over 10000 generations, but we can watch that in the lab over a few days. Of course they are not exactly the same as humans, but the mechanism is similar, and we can observe the same changes happening slowly in humans, and thus extrapolate.
(You are free to take the hard empricist position, and disbelieve anything not seen with your own eyes. I hope you will not, because it implies disbelief