Slashdot Mirror
Artificial Life Forms Evolve Basic Memory, Strategy
Calopteryx notes a New Scientist piece on how digital organisms in a computer world called Avida replicate, mutate, and have evolved a rudimentary form of memory. Another example of evolution in a simulation lab is provided by reader Csiko: "An evolutionary algorithm was used to derive a control strategy for simulated robot soccer players. The results are interesting — after a few hundred generations, the robots learn to defend, pass, and score — amazing considering that there was no trainer in the system; the self-organizing differentiated behavior of the players emerged solely out of the evolutionary process."
Wow look at that teamwork.. maybe those guys could represent England?
"amazing considering that there was no trainer in the system;"
Not really, it's merely selecting patterns it is not aware of if it's patterns are "successful" or not. If you run a pattern generator long enough you can get all possible patterns within a finite possibility space.
If evolution is the work of Gods, and we can refrain from wiping ourselves out in the next few generations, then we shall be as Gods... And if you follow the mythologies of old, we'll probably be just as stupid and make as many silly jealous mistakes as those very "human" Gods from back then...
The study also found that the artificial fans of the losing team started to riot on their own.
When you program some evolutionary theory in your digital world and your digital world is developing some evolutionary lifeform that is news?
A bit more than 15 years ago I saw a documentary on Discovery Channel featuring identical work being made by a brittish scientist / computer programmer. His software spawned simple "lifeforms" made up by basic 2D and 3D geometrical objects - cubes, cylinders, flat triangles etc., - that were then trying to evolve methods of how to most efficiently move and travel in the simulated environment they were put in - sometimes an airy environment with ground underneath them, and gravity, and sometimes an "ocean" in which the "lifeforms" swam. Minute after minute the "lifeforms" jiggered and bounced around like broken machinery, but slowly developing a method for moving and navigating that was the most efficient for their particular shape. He spawned caterpillar-like animals made up from chains of cubes, that slowly learned how to wriggle and crawl just like catterpillars and snakes do. He spawned randomized "freaks" that learned that sometimes managed to learn how to walk with their disfiguring, and sometimes learning that the only way was to throw some bodypart around to pull themselves forward. He spawned biped animals that slowly learned how to jump to move forward, an triped animals that learned how to skip from one leg to the other, to the third. He spawned lifeforms in a watery environment that learned how to rhythmically oscillate their bodyparts to create propulsion in order to swim forward and turn around. To me, this was just as impressive, if not more, than the featured story. As a curious detail to it all, the programmer developed his software in BlitzBasic, running on a heavily accelerated Amiga 1200.
Its allright, if they ever gain sentience we can defeat them with Vuvselas.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
We've been applying genetic algorithms with ANNs for quite a while now, quite often also making groups of them cooperate. yawn?
Experiments and other stuff
In the late 1980s, ecologist Thomas Ray, who is now at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, got wind of Core Wars and saw its potential for studying evolution. He built Tierra, a computerised world populated by self-replicating programs that could make errors as they reproduced.
When the cloned programs filled the memory space available to them, they began overwriting existing copies. Then things changed. The original program was 80 lines long, but after some time Ray saw a 79-line program appear, then a 78-line one. Gradually, to fit more copies in, the programs trimmed their own code, one line at a time. Then one emerged that was 45 lines long. It had eliminated its copy instruction, and replaced it with a shorter piece of code that allowed it to hijack the copying code of a longer program. Digital evolvers had arrived, and a virus was born.
Avida is Tierra's rightful successor. Its environment can be made far more complex, it allows for more flexibility and more analysis, and - crucially - its organisms can't use each other's code. That makes them more life-like than the inhabitants of Tierra.
Actually, organisms using each others code sounds way more like our world than ones that can't leech off each other. They already pointed out viruses, and plenty of species exist today that need other species to continue to survive.. in fact pretty much all animals need to eat other lifeforms because we can't draw energy from the sun directly.
which is totally what she said
So you are saying that soccer is no sports?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The robots need to become spoiled, overpaid millionaires, who refuse to train (France). Brag a lot (England) that their opponent is a bunch of "boys" (Germany), who are afraid of them. Then take a 4-1 shellacking from the "boys." And despite being the defending champions, and having a world class league in their country, bow out early. Because all of the players in their first class league are from South America (Italy), and the they have no good domestic players.
Robots with vuvuzelas? No, thanks. My next nightmare.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Eh, they can play soccer, not too impressive. Check back when they evolve their own religion, that would be impressive.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'm always confused if these discoveries are supposed to show that we'll someday have sentient robots that will rule the world a la every sci-fi for the past decade or if they are trying to model biological evolution in a meaningful way. Personally, I hope the sentient robot thing is NP-complete. :P
For modeling biological evolution, any in silico organism model needs to incorporate the fact that most mutations are "nearly neutral" (some might say slightly deleterious) with respect to the scoring algorithm (selection) while the next largest group is deleterious, and only a small fraction are beneficial. Not every "bit" (base) in a genome has the same value, and certainly that value is related to its context. In the genome mutation can strike anywhere although some places may be lethal so it will never be expressed in a breeding organism. In AI there may be restrictions on the parameters that can change, but in the genome mutations can produce some pretty nasty defects. It's actually the relative badness of those defects which gives selection the power to weed out unfit individuals before the defect can become fixed. However, in biological evolution, defects can and do become fixed, either being linked with good traits or because there isn't sufficient selection power to get rid of them. Thus, after many many generations of "optimizing" the robots should also manifest situations where they do "stupid" things routinely because the "good" things they do are "linked" to the bad things they do on the coding level.
I would tag this as "Intelligent Design".
This is a very simple demonstration that something can evolve from simple beginnings, if the creator was intelligent enough.
A not-so-intelligent designer, OTOH, would probably prefer to create its beings in their final state because it takes more effort to create a system capable of evolution.
I was so amazed by the results claimed for Tierra that I went and reimplemented it myself. And damned if I didn't get similar results. At the time, it blew me away that such a system could come up with novel solutions I hadn't expected or 'programmed in'. Indeed, a couple times it took me a while to even figure out how the things worked.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Of course. Which is why we are evolving algorithms to do things we find desirable (in this case, playing robot soccer) using components that already implement the desireable trains. Much like we have been selecting cows that produce more milk or meat over, I should think, several hundreds of (cow) generations. It's "human-guided evolution", if you will.
Is there a problem with AI here? I don't see it. You could, of course, implement a soccer-playing algorithm yourself. But AI lets you come up with better soccer-playing programs without having to invent and implement a better algorithm or a better set of parameters yourself.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Evolution isn't some process, it's a phenomenon.
Genes get mixed and mutate and everything turns to chaos.
What survives and duplicates gets to the next level. That which dies cannot duplicate and dies.
How simple do you want it? This is where you stop thinking, God or no god.
Here be signatures
Are you kidding? This is an amazing breakthrough! We've been waiting 15 years for this, for the past 50 years.
Yep, We're fucked.
will there be video replay then?
Could be. Everything with religion can be mixed with science. Science is just there to try to understand what's there that is there.
If God does the selecting then you'd be talking about a devine plan (who gets to mate with who) and even that can be explaned with the Many Worlds Interpretation. Just as heaven and hell can be explained with multiple universes.
I do not believe in inteligent design, but I will also not deny other peoples believes, because who am I to claim the right to believe in what I believe if I deny others to have the right to belive in what they believe.
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God :)
Here be signatures
Round in circles here we go...
Considering that we had dinosaurs for many millions of years it seems that god is rather bad at getting evolution to produce humans.
Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say "YES"!
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God :)
Actually if you ask the top scientists, most of them will say they believe in God.
It's the most politically correct answer, but in their minds they are thinking 'no, dumbass, and quit asking'.
When I was young I went to Sunday School religiously. I wanted to believe, and I wanted to see the path.
After years of that, one day in Sunday School I picked up the one book it all centered around (the Bible) and asked the teacher if it was true.
He said 'yes'.
I asked if it was completely true and that all the answers were in there.
He said 'yes'.
Being fairly familiar with the book of Genesis (it was quite interesting, quite detailed, and the first chapter so I read it a few times more often than any others) and the story of the creation of the Earth, I asked if that part was true.
He said 'yes'.
So I said 'Where's the dinosaurs?' Blank stares all around.
I gave him my home phone number and said that when he had an answer for that one, call me and I'll be back. He never called. Now I'm a top scientist.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
A pre-publication (not behind a paywall) version of the Avida (PDF) paper is here. ;^)
A good guide for those who don't welcome our new artificial, man-made overlords and wish to resist
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
.... uh, hmmm..... what was I on about?
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God :)
Do they? This page says that 40% of scientists surveyed believed in god (way less than the populace at large) and only 10% of "elite scientists" believe in god. I wouldn't consider 10% of scientists to be "most" of them.
Enigma
You say evolution's not a process, spout some meaningless garbage about it being a phenomenon, and then go on to define it in terms that sound awfully like a process to me.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/28/AR2010052801856.html
Here be signatures
"So I said 'Where's the dinosaurs?'"
I don't believe in God, like I already said. Especialy not in any one of the religions out there.
Better yet, if he would exist then I am going to seriously kick him very, very hard in the balls after I get passed that gate of heaven and if I won't get in I will break in. I'm that pissed of about certain things.
But thanks for the effort of blocking my effort to open the door to science for fierce legilious people.
Here be signatures
http://www.robocup.org/
- has been going for a very long time, and often involves more sophisticated physical robots.
Also, as many people have pointed out, this is not really all that original. One of the oldest Genetic Programming's PhDs (in 1980) evolved card players. Tierra pre-dates this stuff. Nothing surprising has emerged here, but I guess it is a nice popular science article for those not familiar with the field.
As others have pointed out, Roger Alsing's Mona Lisa is very cool, as is the work that went into evolving an aerial design for NASA:
http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm ... there are over 6000 papers published on Genetic Programming and a huge chunk of them are applications like this. EC techniques like this are just heuristic search algorithms for program spaces.
RS.
give this enough time and the world willl be ending in awhile prepare to nuclear war launched by our computers Judgment day will arrive if they keep this up stock up for war its coming
Not a troll asshole
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
Don't get your hopes up, they have yet to develop the ability to call a sport by the proper name.
If it rhymes it must be true.
The pattern that your brain likes to see in everything is actually cause and effect. Just because I write it down like a process doesn't _make_ it a process.
Here be signatures
Escaping earths orbit, walking on the moon and then making it back alive is sort of somewhat of an evolution to me, but hey...
Here be signatures
And according to that link,
Fully half of these top scientists are religious.
Looking at the referenced book itself, "Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think" by Elaine Ecklund, on page 35 (viewable on Google Books), it says:
About 36 percent of scientists have some form of a belief in God. When this same question about belief in God is asked of members of the general public, about 94 percent claim belief. [...] About 28 percent of scientists who are part of a religious tradition do not know whether or not they believe in God.
This study was explicitly limited to scientists from the following "top" universities, according to the University of Florida's annual report of the "Top American Research Universities":
In other words: according to the source you cite, no, most (64%) of the top scientists do not believe in God.
I think that was mangu's entire point.
As I read it, mangu is saying that any rational, logical take on an intelligent design theory of the universe would likely conclude that any design involved the stipulation and balancing of the underlying rules by which this universe functions, as a very elegantly balanced system that is then allowed to operate independently from the point of the Big Bang (or perhaps earlier if we posit a yo-yo universe), rather than as a hamfisted make-everything-manually, brute-force approach that is not allowed (or perhaps able) to operate independently for even 6,000-odd years.
Anyone who's spent much time coding will no doubt appreciate the idea of a perfectly designed, bug-free system arising from a few lines of simple code that runs forever without the slightest glitch, much more than the image of a bloated behemoth that explicitly instantiates every type of object and codes for every conceivable corner case, and still needs lots of manual bug-fixing while running.
I'm not much of one for religion myself, but if God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, an elegant, ultimately simple, and perfectly balanced universe is much more beautiful and compelling to me. A lot of fundamentalist insistence on things like "God made fossils to test our faith" just sounds far too clumsy for a deity that is supposed to be perfect. Anyway, that's my 2p.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."