Month: September 2022

"TOM RAY was one of the pioneers of virtual artificial life evolution with his program called Tierra. He set up Tierra Network to exploit the internet. His results were mixed and gave limited insights into the Cambrian explosion of life." https://lnkd.in/dssAfsd View in LinkedIn

VIRAL WORMS. "He will keep on breeding them until he has achieved a goal far more adventurous than anything yet attempted by other virus programmers – infusing the vast unused spaces of the global computer networks with a roiling digital ecology as complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to humankind as the rain forests that he has long sought to protect and understand." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

"THOMAS S. RAY "is an ecologist who created and developed the Tierra project, a computer simulation of artificial life. He is currently Professor of Zoology and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma in Norman." https://lnkd.in/dK7aRa2 View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL LIFE. "Tom Ray's story about the program Project Tierra generating random mutations in code and beyond. Why can you mutate genetic code and not computer code? The genetic language consists of an alphabet of 20 letters, whereas the computer language has billions of letters in its alphabet. So you can rearrange 20 letters and get a meaningful word, but it is harder to do that with billions of letters." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

CREATIVE SOLUTION. "Ray reduced the number of letters in the computing language to 32, comparable to the 20 of the genetic language. Mutations in numbered code shuffled the numbers and the bits that fit together could not find each other. So Ray changed number locations in code for shapes, so after mutation, they could still find each other, just like in cells, or the principle of matching metaphorical shapes in 1s and 0s, the language of the binary alphabet." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

TIERRA was "another world that I could inoculate with life, not the same world that we live in, it's not the world of the chemistry of carbon and hydrogen, it's a different universe, the chemistry of bits and bytes." The CPU was the source of energy like the sun in the real world, and the creatures lived in the memory chips. https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

TIERRA. "Code individuals reproduced like bacteria with genomes copied mother to daughter, quickly doubling in number, and with mutations, quickly evolving; due to the action of death, the genetic composition of the community changes over time." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

TIERRA EVOLUTION. "Informational parasites are mutations that steal CPU from the host programs; and, the hosts can also steal CPU from the parasite. Hyper-parasites are hosts that have stolen information from the parasites. Next was cooperation, then cheating. Complexity was born." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF DIVERSITY. "Tierra creatures take resources (energy) and compete for computer time and computer memory, in order to reproduce themselves, and promote their survival. Tierra is a type of evolutionary process in a completely alien environment that can diversify like organic life had. It very quickly diversified and became very rich without any further help from Ray." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

GEEK TALK. "Evolution has produced massively parallel software with enormous complexity embedded in wetware." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn