Category: Uncategorized

ARTIFICIAL LIFE MODELS IN SOFTWARE. Evolution is extremely slow, but Artificial Life simulations can carry out evolutionary scenarios in thousands of generations in relatively short time frames, and the results have been very surprising. https://lnkd.in/d-Zcc8a View in LinkedIn

THE QUESTION OF EVOLUTION remains another big challenge in biology that is not easily amenable to experimentation, but may be answered by deductions from the incomplete fossil record, observations of biodiversity today, and by artificial life experiments. View in LinkedIn

CONSCIOUSNESS. "We believe that if artificial life is to possess consciousness, it must be something that is based upon evolution rather than a fixed, static algorithm. Limiting artificial life to a fixed algorithm is like making it a slave, by making it incapable of achieving a certain level of thought; this is because an algorithm would either limit the artificial life to a specific kind of task or a specific way of thinking." https://lnkd.in/etiQ6T7 View in LinkedIn

HUMAN LIMITS. "The idea that we cannot produce living organisms from our own imaginations is both humbling to the pomposity of our egos, but it is also somewhat distressing. Humans, it seems, can do anything--from creating rockets which launch into space, to cloning the organisms on our planet, to power of creating incredibly powerful weapons which devastate our own kind." https://lnkd.in/etiQ6T7 View in LinkedIn

EXCEPTIONAL GROUP. “Variations in prokaryotic genomes are rare except in the proteobacteria-derived genomes of mitochondria, where the universal code is almost never used. This contrasts with almost no known changes in the cyanobacteria-derived plastids, which may reflect deeper differences in the way mitochondrial genomes evolve, perhaps rooted in a high rate of substitution.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

RANDOMLY MUTATING. "But is not genetic programming stochastic by nature? Although it operates on algorithms, it does not find these algorithms through its own algorithms--it finds them by randomly mutating and genetically crossing other patterns." https://lnkd.in/etiQ6T7 View in LinkedIn

FROZEN FORMAT. “So the code was not always thus, but once it was established before the last universal common ancestor of all extant life it has remained under very powerful selective constraints that kept the code frozen in nearly all genomes that subsequently diversified.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL BIOTA. "The forms of digital biota emerging in Cyberspace. Much of these biota are actually pretty simple mathematical rule sets that mimic living processes. But perhaps real life is just an matter of the scale of complexity. As these simple forms grow into more complex systems feeding off computer resources and our attention spans, perhaps we will some day see something really "alive" and really digital." https://lnkd.in/d8s-JuN View in LinkedIn

THE GREAT MISHMASH. “The ‘frozen accident’, as it was described by Crick, that ultimately emerged is certainly non-random, but is more of a mishmash than an elegant plan, which led to new ideas about how the code may have evolved in a series of steps from simpler codes with fewer amino acids.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

FREE WILL. "Meta-Genetic Programming is the proposed meta learning technique of evolving a genetic programming system using genetic programming itself. It suggests that chromosomes, crossover, and mutation were themselves evolved, therefore like their real life counterparts should be allowed to change on their own rather than being determined by a human programmer." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming View in LinkedIn