Year: 2022

THE BOTTLENECK. "As fascinating as these robots are, they're designed by people. By engineers sitting at a desk, deciding how pieces should go together...Often, we humans are the bottleneck. We can't create such a rich diversity as evolution can." https://lnkd.in/dtVFGBG View in LinkedIn

"UNGUIDED EVOLUTION is a philosophical extension to the scientific theory of evolution. It is the idea that evolution is guided by one simple principle — living long enough to reproduce; that neither nature nor the process of evolution and natural selection are partial to what reproduces or how; that there is no ultimate form of life that is the "target" of all this reproduction, mutation, and selection." https://lnkd.in/dZQjh64 View in LinkedIn

VIRTUAL MENAGERIE. "The creatures of artificial life already make up a strange menagerie. There are flocking birds and schooling fish just a few generations removed from the cartoons of Walt Disney. Invisible bugs breed and die out as they leave trails through a mound of electronic food. Computer flowers bud and unfold, their timing controlled by computer chemicals running up and down computer stems. Stick-figure shapes evolve in a few dozen generations into startling butterflies and shellfish." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn

RICHARD DAWKINS, on artificial life. "It's not a substance; there's no living material. It's just an incidental fact that in real living things the entities that happen to be organized happen to be made of organic, soft, squishy stuff, whereas in a computer they're made of hard, nonmoving chips.'' https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn

ABSTRACTABLE LOGIC. "Stripped of bone and sinew, leaf and petal, ribosome and chromosome, life still has a unique logic that can be abstracted in a computer." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn

LEFT FIELD. "The recognition in recent years that complexity can arise spontaneously from simple systems gives the field of artificial life its strongest motivation. The scientists agreed that the most promising demonstrations were those whose lifelike qualities emerge unbidden, surprising even their programmers. 'Miracles Aren't Allowed'." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn

SQUISHY QUESTIONS. "When does a curve look like a bug?" It is easier for a person to answer this question than any algorithm. https://lnkd.in/dZcpeGh View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY FROM SIMPLICITY. "Scientists have discovered in recent years that some seemingly complicated patterns, like the branching, jagged structures of plants, have simple descriptions in the language of fractal geometry, in which patterns are built up from rules repeated on different scales." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn

FRACTAL GEOMETRY. "No one knows just how such rules are encoded in the genes of real plants; nevertheless, several demonstrations at Los Alamos created lifelike ferns, trees and even flowers from relatively modest fractal instructions." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn

THE HOPE. 'If we have a system that can organize itself or can evolve in some sense, then the hope is that down the road the system, without any thought or care on our part, will become intelligent.'' https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn