Month: September 2022

GODLESS FERAL COMMUNITIES. "Or to put it more bluntly, feral viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university labs) represent the only known simulation of life that does not implicitly (and quite unscientifically) build God into the system." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL MINIMAL CELL EQUIVALENT. "He organised a contest to write the smallest possible functional self-replicating computer virus and concluded there is an absolute minimum size. He concludes from the minimum size that random processes inside a computer cannot create the smallest virus; even then such a virus could be an evolutionary dead end." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn

CURATED CODE. "The only way to fully understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing computer programs is to take into account their one essential difference from organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture, brought forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

GENETIC INHERITANCE. "Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself pondering a logical next move: what if someone were now to develop a strain of polymorphs with a genetic memory, so that rather than completely reshuffling their structure with every generation, the few mutants that escape discovery by heuristics could pass their undetectable code on to their offspring?" https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

BREEDING CODE. “The result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine," a programming utility that turns any normal DOS virus into a souped-up, genetically evolving polymorph, complete with an option for sexual gene-swapping between individuals that come into contact in the wild." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

BINGO! Code elements that can swap information randomly, and which have some inheritable memory of antecedent code? This sounds like the digital equivalent of viruses and bacteria in nature. https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL INFORMS BIOLOGY. "Running his beloved viruses through assorted experimental hoops and mazes, Ludwig followed them to the conclusion that Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms alone are just not mathematically fertile enough to have created and shaped life as we know it." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

ROUGH DIAMOND. "Ludwig managed a remarkable intellectual shift. He elevated the computer virus from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint to an object capable of perhaps infinite variations and almost lifelike behavior. He transformed a tool of vandals into a field of scientific study by emphasizing a computer virus' biological affinity." (Graffiti malware to academic artificial life). https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL UNIVERSE. "What we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?" https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

EXPANDING UNIVERSE. "We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us...there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn