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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
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!
Where were you during the World Cup?
Soccer is a religion!
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
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!
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.
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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.
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
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/28/AR2010052801856.html
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