Category: Uncategorized

AUTONOMY. "We re-think the notion of autonomy of evolving systems, and show that evolutionary systems are characterized by a particular type of syntactic autonomy." An energetic and terse voyage into terra infirma. http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/sa.html View in LinkedIn

AMBITIOUS GOAL. “Evolutionary robotics is on the rise. Instead of robots being designed by human beings, machines run iterative processes to produce new code for the robot’s controller. A team of international scientists from Germany, The Netherlands, France and the UK are proposing a new framework called The Triangle of Life. Their aim is to bring the development of robots to a point where it truly mimics biological evolution.” https://lnkd.in/dyHuU2m View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC EVOLUTION. “We propose an experimental study where simplistic organisms rise from inanimate matter and evolve solely through physical interactions. These organisms are composed of three types of macroscopic building blocks floating in an agitated medium. Our results suggest that an autonomous evolution of non-biological organisms can be realized in human-designed environments and, potentially, in natural environments as well.” https://lnkd.in/dWJXxpX View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL COMPUTATION. "The borderline between using biological ideas to solve computational problems (bio-inspired computing) and attempting to build systems that behave like biological organisms (artificial life) is fine and often hard to define." https://lnkd.in/dWc3sBk View in LinkedIn

DEBATE. “The Strange, Disembodied Life of Digital Organisms.The article dealt with the effort to model living, evolving organisms as little bits of supposedly living, evolving computer code, and was in part a critique of an article that appeared in the leading scientific journal, Nature, in May 2003." Read the ensuing firestorm of criticism. https://lnkd.in/diF4rQP View in LinkedIn

PRIMORDIAL DIGITAL SOUP. “What would happen, McCaskill had wondered, if one made a soup of Turing machines and let them collide; one collision partner would act as the machine, and the other partner in the collision would act as the input tape. The soup of programs would act on itself, rewriting each other's programs until... Until what? Well, it didn't work. Many Turing machine programs are able to enter infinite loop and "hang." http://www.panspermia.org/computrs.htm View in LinkedIn

ORIGINS. “Any theory holding that life originates on Earth de novo from nonliving chemicals has problems for which computers provide a good metaphor. The problems are in two categories, hardware and software. For life as for computers, both are required, together. After eukaryotic cellular life has become established, in this metaphor, the machinery for creating new biological hardware is in place, and the remaining problem is one of software only. How does the genetic programming for new evolutionary features get written and installed?” http://www.panspermia.org/computrs.htm View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY. “The hallmark of complexity theory is the extensive use of information theory and computers to model the behavior of notoriously complex problems such as economic markets, protein folding, and evolution.” http://www.panspermia.org/computrs.htm View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING BITS. “Unlike mere numerical simulations, Avida organisms possess the ability to evolve in an open-ended manner, often revealing unexpected and strikingly clever solutions. The most widely used digital evolution platform is Avida.” https://lnkd.in/d_KmGRx View in LinkedIn

THE HYPE. “But, predictably, the scientific merit of the purported "breakthroughs" is paltry at best. Notwithstanding the fad and the hype, there's, well, no news here. A BetaBeat story on the topic, "Google’s New Computer With Human-Like Learning Abilities Will Program Itself," is essentially a big, emotive headline with no real content.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/10/is_google_a_ste090771.html View in LinkedIn