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"A WATERSHED in the history of computing. It has long been observed, rather wistfully, that in principle the world's computers sum up to one gigantic parallel processor, and that the crushing bulk of that metacomputer's CPU cycles goes to waste, unused. Only now, however, with the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, safely and sensibly." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

MUTATING REPLICONS. "Once the soup is full of replicating creatures, individuals are initially short lived, generally reproducing only once before dying, thus individuals turn over very rapidly. More slowly, there appear new genotypes of size 80, and then new size classes. There are changes in the genetic composition of each size class, as new mutants appear, some of which increase significantly in frequency, eventually replacing the original genotype." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

FOOTNOTE. Was the Cambrian explosion an artifact of massive geological events that wiped clean a vast swathe of biological history in most of the globe? The idea of the Cambrian explosion has been deeply embedded in biology, but begs more questions than it answers. Hold that thought for another time. View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN SHADOW. "This work represents a first step in this direction, creating an artificial world which may roughly parallel the RNA world of self-replicating molecules (still falling far short of the Cambrian explosion)." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY. "The work presented here aims to parallel the second major event in the history of life, the origin of diversity. Rather than attempting to create prebiotic conditions from which life may emerge, this approach involves engineering over the early history of life to design complex evolvable organisms, and then attempting to create the conditions that will set off a spontaneous evolutionary process of increasing diversity and complexity of organisms." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

DISTRIBUTION UNCERTAIN. “Ascarosides have not yet been found in any other animal phylum, and thus we hypothesized that short-chain ascarosides comprise a nematode-specific chemical code mediating a variety of behaviors in many different species.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

CODE ADULTERATION. "Several debuggers modify the target application’s code. The de-bugger by Vanegue et al., for example, injects its code into the debugged process. Other designs such as gdb also modify the target’s code to implement break-points, by replacing the target code with a software interrupt instruction." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

BEHAVIOR CHANGING WORDS. “In C. elegans, a family of small-molecule pheromones called ascarosides regulates gender-specific attraction, repulsion, aggregation, olfactory plasticity, and entry into dauer (a stress-resistant life stage), collectively demonstrating that ascarosides mediate a wide range of C. elegans behaviors.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS. "Imagine a variety of components: hardware and software modules, files, websites, interfaces, users... All these components interact by exchanging information. Assume that neighboring components have the capability to mutually adapt: by sending messages back and forth they negotiate until they achieve a common "understanding", in which they both can settle. But coordination does not stop there: it propagates back and forth between all components, until a globally stable order is created." https://lnkd.in/dkkAEiE View in LinkedIn

CONSERVED DIALECT. “Ascaroside Signaling Is Widely Conserved among Nematodes. A group of small molecules called ascarosides has been found to mediate mate finding, aggregation, and developmental diapause in Caenorhabditis elegans, but it is unknown whether ascaroside signaling exists outside of the genus Caenorhabditis.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn