Month: September 2022

HUMAN-COMPUTER COLLABORATION. "Computers can tease out the ideas from a person...and gradually generate new ideas." https://lnkd.in/dtVFGBG View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL SELECTION. "The experiments described here use evolutionary computation for design, and additive fabrication for reproduction. The evolutionary process operates on a population of candidate robots, each composed of some repertoire of building blocks. The evolutionary process iteratively selects fitter machines, creates offspring by adding, modifying and removing building blocks using a set of operators, and replaces them into the population." https://lnkd.in/dJJ9HmD View in LinkedIn

REPLICATING ROBOT. "This is, to our knowledge, the first time any artificial evolution system has been connected to an automatic physical construction system. Taken together, our evolutionary design system, `solidification' process, and rapid prototyping machine form a primitive replicating robot." https://lnkd.in/dJJ9HmD View in LinkedIn

REALITY GAP. "We believe that if indeed artificial systems are to ultimately interact and integrate with reality, they cannot remain virtual; it is crucial that they cross the simulation±reality gap to learn, to evolve, and to affect the physical world directly. Eventually, the evolutionary process must accept feedback from the live performance of its products." https://lnkd.in/dJJ9HmD View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE explores the morphological explosion in animal body plans half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian period, and why this has essentially ground to a halt. In the second part of this two weekend posting, there is a deeper exploration of the subject from a genetic perspective ensues. Extinctions are much easier to explain than a massive expansion in biological diversity that arrives quickly and flattens out. What were the reasons for both the emergence and end of massive diversification? View in LinkedIn

ONLY 36 PHYLA OF ANIMALS. "There are 36 recognized animal phyla, of which but nine (Mollusca, Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, and Chordata) contain the vast majority of described, extant species. Body plan is one approach to defining phyla." https://lnkd.in/dWhEMWG View in LinkedIn

BURST OF CREATIVITY. "The question of how the morphological 'design' of the thirty-five or so animal phyla arose in a burst of creative evolutionary activity in the geologically distant past." https://lnkd.in/d-B5nwz View in LinkedIn

COMMON BODY PLANS. "Animals greatly exemplify how enormous morphological diversity can arise through evolution. However, despite their profound variation in forms, there are clear commonalities in how animal body plans are built." https://lnkd.in/dT-s3Z5 View in LinkedIn

STRUCTURAL HOMOLOGIES. "The early formation of distinct germ layers, the establishment of body axes, the differentiation of photoreceptors or the deployment of similar neuronal architectures are examples attesting to deep homologies at the tissue and cellular level." https://lnkd.in/dT-s3Z5 View in LinkedIn

CONTROL HOMOLOGIES. "One of the most remarkable discoveries of the past few years is that the major elements controlling animal development are quite similar across a wide range of body plans." https://lnkd.in/dx4KvtT View in LinkedIn