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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.
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...
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
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
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.
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....
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?
...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
Slashdot has alot of Athiests and smart, critial thinkers. It is only natural we piss on Creationism, mainly because it is so lacking of science it is the Micheal Jackson of the scientific area.
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"
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.
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.
Simple definition usually is that if two organisms can't produce viable, fertile offspring then they're of different species.
Even in sexual organisms, this definition of species has some problems. You can easily have organism A that can breed with B, and B can breed with C, but A and C are incompatable. How do your divide up the species lines in this case?
In general, when a new species forms, each organism has to have others it can mate with, or else they would just die out without any offspring. The speciation process is a gradual one, and so, theoretically, there is probably a path you could follow between any two sexual organisms where any pair on the path could theoretically mate.
In Avida, for simplicity, we determine species by testing each orgasnism against the species of its parent. If it can cross-over at most points with the prototype of that species, it is marked as being part of that same species. If it cannot, we create a new species for it where it is the prototype. Not an ideal method, but it works in most cases (and we rarely need to resort to the species concept).
What's fun, is that this even works for asexual organisms. We can force all possible crossovers (in isolation of course -- this never feeds back into the system) to see if they would have any ability to mate if they has been sexual.
Dr. Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab
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.)
> 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
"these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them"
Imagine the video games that could come out of this?
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.
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the computer you're using, the chair in which you sit, the glass from which you drink all had an intelligent designer. What makes the planet and the universe different? To be quite frank, I think the chances of so many different species of life forming on one planet from some primordial soup is pretty far out there. I think it takes more faith to believe in the (ever changing) beliefs of science than to believe in the Bible.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
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.
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.
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
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.
Baby raper? Was it anything like this:
.
Evolution: Rap It Up!
(When rapping, follow the rhythm of
Salt-N-Pepa's "None of Your Business.")
Chorus
If I want to teach tonight. Evolution? Right!
None of your business.
If you want to be a freak 'n teach it on the weekend,
None of my business.
What chu doin' with their lives
Leavin' evolution out?
Don't chu think that you should make a stand
and stop the doubts? Ha!
Darwin, Mayer, Watson, Crick,
Mendel(son) 'n old Lamarck,
Retro-, transpo-, hepadn-,
Makes you want to barf? Right!
Flu is evolution too
And you thought you were so safe.
AIDS 'n cold sores-scary stuff but
Changes we've all met. So. . .
Now you know just what IT is.
Change and Evolution. Same!
Don't be suckered into playing
Brown vs. Board games.
(Chorus).
If I want to teach tonight. Evolution? Right!
None of your business.
If you want to be a freak 'n teach it on the weekend,
None of my business.
Go for it.
Source
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
No, he is such a complex organism that he must have been designed.
The intelligent design argument is self-contradictory.
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.
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