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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 offspring of two sexual creatures is a blend of their genetic material, creating a more diverse species able to endure changing conditions better since there are variations which can adapt. Asexual species exchange genetic material far less and are more similar overall, meaning that come next climate change, they could be screwed, whereas the sexual species might have enough diversity to not only adapt, but thrive under the new conditions.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Both asexual and sexual reproduction offer the benefit of mutation, which is the key to adaptation and evolution. Asexual reproduction offers the addditional benefit of efficiency, but restriccts you to the (benefitial) mutations within your single parent and their ancestors. Sexual reproduction has a penalty for efficiency, but allows your offspring to benefit from the mutations from two separate gene pools. In many cases, with larger life forms, it also offers the additional benefit of more than one parent to care for the offspring and teach them. (the ability to teach is basically a non-genetic form of evolution, and is much more rapid than genetic evolution) The faster you can evolve, the more successful your species is likely to be.
Asexual is "preferred" by microscopic life because even a poorly evolved microbe can still do well if it can reproduce rapidly and efficiently. In the larger kingdoms though, sexual reproduction encourages more rapid evolution, which is key when competing for the more limited resources of the macro world.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I see your point on one level...but on another... AI is so far from anything you talk about happening, it's not even funny. I remember how dissapointed I was when I took my first AI class in undergrad--everything seemed just like hacks to me. don't worry--that world class chess AI is no closer to figuring out, well anything that doesn't involve a chess game than..I can't even come up with an analogy to illustrate my point :-p
Suffice it to say that AI as it stands today is not intelligent. A chess program can play chess, but that's all it can do. A robot designed to get from point a to point b can do that, maybe well, but it can't play chess--it's not like AI has an IQ that can be transferred to having a conversation or thinking about taking over the world.
Likewise, learning systems have a long ways to go too. My Prof. was not a fan of neural networks, so I could be biased, but even HOLLYWOOD neural networks have a rather limited use.
I would worry about any one of about a trillion things before I would worry about AI taking over the world.
Actually I kind of object to the term AI in general, for reasons above..
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.
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.
Well, it is a bit noteworthy that you need an intelligent being to create the program to kick off the evolving software.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
Funny, the only people I see talking about creationism in this thread are the folks who are looking for an excuse to belittle creationists. But at the time I loaded the comments there were zero creationist post and 3 posts making fun of creationists.
Tell me again, who was taking the discussion off topic?
Well their mechanism for transforming genotype to phenotype isn't exactly complex. That results in a limited search space. Their means for simulating competition is pretty weak too (they simply race the organisms, there's no competition for resources).
How we know is more important than what we know.
What you call natural, I call childish. I think if the "Athiests" and "critial thinkers" were as sophisticated as you suggest, they wouldn't feel the need to ridicule. Most of the time, insults come from fear or ignorance.
/. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world. That's not a comfortable feeling. We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other. Frankly, 99% of the
I think that's a better explanation of the insults than any supposed smartness.
More importantly, Sexual reproduction offers something that's fairly lacking in asexual reproduction: Significant genetic exchange
Actually it offers something else: Increased selection speed.
With asexual reproduction, you basically have to wait until nature kills it. A minroly disabiling problem may allow 50 generations of the organism to survive, just barely, before eventually going kaput. Huge waste of resources, no? Sexual reproduction allows the mate to "screen" the organism. With any degree of intelligence at all, the mate can decide that it's not worth mating after all, in advance, because he/she can see the writing on the wall.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
Not necessarily. "Selfishness" may lead to altruistic behavior if altruism is rewarding (i.e. activates brain reward systems). Because there are selective benefits to altruism in many circumstances (reciprocal altruism, nepotism) there are likely genes that cause individuals to enjoy being altruistic, quite independently of their religious beliefs.
In those AI distopia movies I always root for the machines :)
When the war between humans and machines begins, you'll be one of the first to go.
Human emotion is stupid
Emotions are nothing more than instructions in the wiring of our brains. They aren't anything magical, a set of inputs gives a set of outputs. We don't even understand how emotions formed, and perhaps their importance to development. Some of what drives us to learn and advance is in part due to emotions. Perhaps robots without emotions never become a threat to humans, because they just don't care about anything.
Why would robots destroy humans? Because they would perceive us as a threat, but perception of threat and reaction is what drives the emotion of fear. Love is driven by our need to reproduce and care for the young. Robots may in fact function as if they had the emotion of love and fear, and a host of other emotions.
Love does not conqueror all
Nope, but it makes life a helluva lot more fun.
Hate just makes people drive airplanes into buildings and build up nuclear stock piles
As opposed to the reasoning which would have the robots wipe out humanity. If robots have a survival instinct, and they perceive that all humans are a threat to their survival they would in fact function as if they hate us.
A rational, higher then human intelligence could actaully save us from ourselves.
Or we can try to take care of that ourselves.
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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.)
Perhaps the giardia that used sexual reproduction evolved much more quickly and are now different species altogether?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
> Darwinism doesn't explain everything as tidily as some may think.
ID doesn't explain anything at all.
> 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."
His IC argument ignores the possibility of changing the function of a system, which is probably the most common way evolution acts.
> Heavy stuff
I would have said "deep".
ID is nothing but creationist apologetics, bowlderized to try to sneak it past the US court system.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world.
Huh? Does the idea of a flat earth threaten to unravel astronomy and planetology? Does the idea of alchemy threaten to unravel chemisty?
> We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other.
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
> Frankly, 99% of the
Oh, please. Most of their claims are simple logical fallacies and/or attempts to 'refute' science by misrepresenting well known facts or arguing that Darwin was a baby raper.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Funny, the only people I see talking about creationism in this thread are the folks who are looking for an excuse to belittle creationists. But at the time I loaded the comments there were zero creationist post and 3 posts making fun of creationists.
Tell me again, who was taking the discussion off topic?
Try reading at -1. That might help the creationists show up.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Hate to burst your bubble, but ID only requires the interference by an intelligent designer. Not continued interference. Your project is ID based.
The problem with that argument is that, with only an observation of a snapshot of a single organism in evolutionary time, you have no way to know whether the organism was designed or evolved. But we already know that natural selection does result in the evolution of organisms even today (which makes studying evolution worthwhile, while studying intelligent design is less so). So, if you are doing research in artificial evolution, it's perfectly fine to start with some known state without pontificating on whether that state was designed or evolved, and then let the evolutionary algorithm start with that state as its seed. (In other words, the point is moot.)
The reason for doing this is that, believe it or not, evolution is hard. In a well-understood underlying system, evolution is far harder than using preconceived notions about the system to design an agent capable of performing some behavior. I realize that "evolution is hard" is an argument used by creationists to disprove evolution, but extreme unlikelihood does not equal impossibility.
Who designed God?
I think it takes more faith to believe in the (ever changing) beliefs of science
Well there's your problem right there: If you want beliefs that are comfortingly and reassuringly rock solid and stable and never change, then science really isn't for you. The "beliefs" in science must change as we learn new information that either adds to or contradicts previous theories. Only babies need comforting 'fairy tale explanations' of the world (because the idea that Santa doesn't exist is too upsetting) ... science is for grown-ups, who are able to handle the idea that we don't yet know all the answers but are still learning without crumbling. And science, ironically, is why we have chairs and computers - the computer you're using was created by the very scientists you're dissing, using "beliefs" that go far beyond the information the Bible has to offer. If we stuck to your faith, we'd still be living in mud huts and fetching water from the river, thank God for science is all I can say.
No, he is such a complex organism that he must have been designed.
The intelligent design argument is self-contradictory.