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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.
Why sex? Meiotic recombination! It's all about avoiding that monoculture...
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...
http://demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/
How we know is more important than what we know.
Its generally clear that sexual reproduction has long term benefits that will help a species... genetic exchange allows multiple benefical mutations to recombine into a single organism rather than competing with each other.
But this benefit is only in the *long term*. What would allow sex to be around long enough in the first place to allow this to come into play? Any individual subgroup is likely to be more successful if they don't have to (1) find mates, (2) maintain all of the extra mechanisms to facilitate recombination, or (3) have only half of their population (the males) actually producing offspring.
There are many alternative hypotheses about how sex could get started (and in what situations it would have short-term benefits) and we're trying to explore these one-by-one in Avida.
Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab
Fortunately, I think that it'll be somewhat difficult to create a true computer virus based on this code. The Avida organisms are written in a virtual assembly language that is quite different from real-world assembly languages. The commands are simplified and designed to do *something* reasonable in just about any situation.
We've done some experiments with more complex genetic languages, but in all cases they just didn't evolve as well without very specialized mutation types.
I can think of a number of ways that it would be possible to design an evolving computer virus, but I hope they're all non-intuitive enough that we have some time before anyone manages to get one working well. I've often though about trying to extend this work into the security arena -- if I didn't have so many projects going at once right now, I'd seriously consider that.
Dr. Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab
This is a very good point. Computer viruses actually have the computer as a "host" and hence fit the definition well. We tend to compare the digital organisms to computer viruses as a way of explaining them to people, but you are right that they're not the same thing.
We are, however, doing some research on viruses within Avida. Specifically, we allow organisms to inject small snippets of code into each other. Sometimes these code segments could have the ability to take over the replication mechanisms inside of the digital organisms host and force them to use up their resources to make more copies of the snippet. These are much closer to the classical definition of a virus.
Dr. Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab
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".
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The reality is that attacking Creationists is so much fun. Their comically stupid in the way they repeat their arguments ad infinitum, yet it stimulates you to read stuff you don't normally read. However, it does radicalise you too much. Which is why I stopped. But lots of fun. And yeah at the end of it you just can't treat them seriously, they don't even pass the Turing Test as far as I can see they are so mechanical in their thought processes. Sad but true.
Bitter and proud of it.
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.