Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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
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!
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.
...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.
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....
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
Maybe it's because millions of CPU-hours is peanuts compared to the Earth over its lifespan? An unparalleled massively parallel biochemical lab would be comparable to untold trillions of CPU hours.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.)
> On the face of it, it would seem to provide some evidence for the Intelligent Design crowd.
No, it doesn't even provide evidence that biological evolution doesn't work, because it's just a simulator. A "failed" simulation hardle proves that the real thing doesn't work. Especially when the simulator doesn't even try to be a detailed model of the real thing.
And even if it did provide evidence that biological evolution doesn't work, that would not be evidence of an intelligent designer.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them"
Imagine the video games that could come out of this?
Sounds more like the resume of a lawyer.
liqbase
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.
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.
Holy shit! So that's what the guys in Redmond were trying to do the whole time! So I guess all the anti-trust trials were just - ehm - testing?
AccountKiller
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.
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
I don't think it will have the capability of emotional joy in threatening you, so it will just kill you I guess.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
Could you please explain how? I really can't understand where you got this from. I would have thought atheism leads to the most selfless acts. See, if you are religious you (in most religions) get rewarded (or not) after you die. Every good thing gets rewarded. You have a limited time on Earth but get rewarded for *eternity* for whatever you do.
An atheist doesn't think there is a god (and therefore an afterlife), no matter what an atheist does they will (in their mind) never get rewarded after death (you just rot in the ground). The *only* time a atheist has is right now during their life. Any help you receive limits the amount of time they have to enjoy their (comparatively) very limited life, while a religious person has eternity to enjoy "heaven" (or wherever they believe they go).
If you want a analogy: If I knew I was going to win a billion (eternal life), giving you $100 is nothing. If I only had $1000 (limited atheist life) giving you $100 is a bloody lot.
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.
Computer simulations are used to enlighten us as to the nature of Reality. The computer you used to create your post, and the computer network that brought that post to my eyes, were all made possible via computer simulation. The idea that "the program gave you exactly what you predetermined in the code" is only true in that our computers are technically deterministic, but your implication that computer simulation can only, at best, "validate what you expect as you design it", is utter nonsense.
Whether you're doing finite element analysis, circuit design, or evolutionary computation, computer simulations can tell you new things, things you didn't expect. Verification is only one of the purposes of computer simulation... discovery is another. And, in the case of evolutionary computation, it can be argued that computer simulations aren't a simulation of evolution... they are in instance of it. The changes that occur in a population of imperfect replicators is evolution, whether those imperfect replicators are made of bits or atoms.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
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.