Category: Uncategorized

REPEATED REFINEMENT. "Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton’s second law of motion." (Eureqa). https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

"COCKROACHES: Indestructible, and Instructive to Robot Makers. The cockroach structure and motion could work better than other, more wormlike designs for robots to explore sites where war or natural disaster has caused buildings to collapse. “This is the model for soft robots. Roaches could end up being the source of inspiration for machines that save people’s lives. https://lnkd.in/dQSTw9D View in LinkedIn

BOT WARS. “Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages.” https://lnkd.in/du9yK8t View in LinkedIn

ABDUCTIVE ACTIVE LEARNING. "At the beginning of any investigation, the Robot Scientist has not discovered any information, therefore all possible hypotheses are equally valid. As the directed discovery process continues, each new observation (or experiment/interpretation cycle) will invalidate some of the hypotheses, thereby excluding incorrect discoveries. The experiment selection process aims to choose the experiment most likely to refute the most hypotheses." https://lnkd.in/dUdRjJH View in LinkedIn

BIG DATA MINING. "Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis." (Eureqa). https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

LATENT POTENTIAL. "We show that when we require such networks to be viable on one particular carbon source, they are typically also viable on multiple other carbon sources that were not targets of selection. For example, viability on glucose may entail viability on up to 44 other sole carbon sources. Any one adaptation in these metabolic systems typically entails multiple potential exaptations. Metabolic systems thus contain a latent potential for evolutionary innovations with non-adaptive origins." https://lnkd.in/dqbbJy3 View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTIONARY INNOVATIONS. "Some evolutionary innovations may originate non-adaptively as exaptations, or pre-adaptations, which are by-products of other adaptive traits. Examples include feathers, which originated before they were used in flight, and lens crystallins, which are light-refracting proteins that originated as enzymes." https://lnkd.in/dqbbJy3 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends considers the evolution of metabolic pathways. A functional cellular metabolism is arguably the test of whether genetics is actually working. And cellular metabolism has turned out to be remarkably intricate and complex. It is hard to imagine how this evolved by trial-and-error adaptations, even given aeons of time. But redundancies and futile cycles give some clues about its chaotic construction. View in LinkedIn

VON NEUMANN'S CREATURE. "For decades von Neumann's virtual creature was reviewed, criticized and reworked, but still no one actually attempted to implement an artificial creature able to reproduce itself. Chris Langton, took it upon himself to create a creature that fulfilled Von Neumann's criteria of reproduction." https://lnkd.in/dSdcD2A View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY AND INFORMATION. "Around 1950 mathematicians and computer scientists began studying artificial self replicating systems in order to gain a deeper understanding of complex systems and the fundamental information processing principles involved in self replication." https://lnkd.in/dAx3RM7 View in LinkedIn