User: papou

Tierra Digital Evolution

On: A Primer On DNA Computing And Software Breeding

For a most intriguing experiment on evolutionary computing, have a look at Tom Ray's Tierra Homepage. From the project website:

The Tierra C source code creates a virtual computer and its Darwinian operating system, whose architecture has been designed in such a way that the executable machine codes are evolvable. This means that the machine code can be mutated (by flipping bits at random) or recombined (by swapping segments of code between algorithms), and the resulting code remains functional enough of the time for natural (or presumably artificial) selection to be able to improve the code over time.

There's also an ongoing network experiment where several "islands" of evolution are linked via the Internet.

Very interesting stuff.

Timelines

On: A History Of Computing

I recently found the computer history museum website. It features a nice illustrated timeline of computing history. You can find it at

http://www.computerhistory.org

Another interesting timeline can be found on the IEEE Computer Society website:

http://computer.org/history

The Age of Spiritual Machines

On: Social/Technological Implications Of Nanotech?

Ray Kurzweil's book "The Age of Spiritual Machines---When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" is an interesting read. He does talk quite a bit about nanotechnology. You can find chapter six of this work online at the book's website: http://www.penguinputnam.com/kurzweil/index.htm This site also has a nice links section. You could also read the article by Bill Joy on wired.com that was inspired in large part by this book: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html Mitre corp's website on nanoelectronics and nanocomputing is also worthy of your attention: http://www.mitre.org/centers/wc3/nanotech/index.ht ml Have fun.