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EMERGENT PHENOMENA IN SILICO. "Finally, after just over 4,000 generations, test system settled upon the best program. As predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on coevolution. It seems intuitive that two interdependent creatures could affect each others evolutionary trajectory. Thus the continuity of the germplasm into the future — that driver of life — is not simply affected by successful mating and gene reshuffling, but by what type of company you keep, wittingly or not. This includes the microbiome of multiple creatures in and on your body. This is an exemplar of Darwin’s tangled bank seen through the lens of time, dynamic and active. View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL PRIMORDIAL SOUP. "He cooked up a batch of primordial data-soup by generating fifty random blobs of ones and zeros. One by one his computer loaded these digital genomes into the FPGA chip, played the two distinct audio tones, and rated each genome’s fitness according to how closely its output satisfied pre-set criteria. Occasional mutations were introduced into the fruit of their digital loins when the control program randomly changed a one or a zero here and there." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

"HARDWARE EVOLUTION. The concept is roughly analogous to Charles Darwin’s elegant principle of natural selection, which describes how individuals with the most advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This process tends to preserve favorable characteristics by passing them to the survivors’ descendants, while simultaneously suppressing the spread of less-useful traits." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

SILICON EVOLUTION. "As predicted, with each breeding cycle the offspring evolved slightly, nudging the population incrementally closer to the computer’s pre-programmed definition of the perfect individual. The candidates in question were not the stuff of blood, guts, and chromosomes that are normally associated with evolution, rather they were clumps of ones and zeros residing within a specialized computer chip. As these primitive bodies of data bumped together in their silicon logic cells." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL INFORMATION ROOT. "Software is stored in the hardware as magnetic domains on the hard drive or floppy disc, or as low and high voltages in computer chips. When you type on a keyboard, each character is converted into an electrical series of 0's and 1's which are then stored as low and high voltages in the computer chips called RAM." https://lnkd.in/d-JGnVK View in LinkedIn

THE INFINITE POSSIBILITY. "While today’s computers politely use programmed instructions to solve predictable problems, these adaptable alternatives may one day strip away such limits and lay bare the elegant solutions that the human mind is reluctant— or powerless— to conceive on its own." https://lnkd.in/d-JGnVK View in LinkedIn

INCOMPREHENSIBLE SYSTEMS. “There is concern that a dormant “gene” in a medical system or flight control program might express itself without warning, sending the mutant software on an unpredictable rampage. Similarly, poorly defined criteria might allow a self-adapting system to explore dangerous options in its single-minded thrust towards efficiency, placing human lives in peril." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

STANDARD DISTRIBUTION CURVE OF ERRORS. "The standard evolutionary picture tells us that evolution is messy, incomplete and inefficient." https://lnkd.in/dycehf5 View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION IS MESSY. "These evolutionary computer systems may almost appear to demonstrate a kind of sentience as they dispense graceful solutions to complex problems. But this apparent intelligence is an illusion caused by the fact that the overwhelming majority of design variations tested by the system— most of them appallingly unfit for the task— are never revealed." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn