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CREATIVE SOLUTION. "Ray reduced the number of letters in the computing language to 32, comparable to the 20 of the genetic language. Mutations in numbered code shuffled the numbers and the bits that fit together could not find each other. So Ray changed number locations in code for shapes, so after mutation, they could still find each other, just like in cells, or the principle of matching metaphorical shapes in 1s and 0s, the language of the binary alphabet." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL LIFE. "Tom Ray's story about the program Project Tierra generating random mutations in code and beyond. Why can you mutate genetic code and not computer code? The genetic language consists of an alphabet of 20 letters, whereas the computer language has billions of letters in its alphabet. So you can rearrange 20 letters and get a meaningful word, but it is harder to do that with billions of letters." https://lnkd.in/d_8VqjV View in LinkedIn

"THOMAS S. RAY "is an ecologist who created and developed the Tierra project, a computer simulation of artificial life. He is currently Professor of Zoology and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma in Norman." https://lnkd.in/dK7aRa2 View in LinkedIn

VIRAL WORMS. "He will keep on breeding them until he has achieved a goal far more adventurous than anything yet attempted by other virus programmers – infusing the vast unused spaces of the global computer networks with a roiling digital ecology as complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to humankind as the rain forests that he has long sought to protect and understand." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

"TOM RAY was one of the pioneers of virtual artificial life evolution with his program called Tierra. He set up Tierra Network to exploit the internet. His results were mixed and gave limited insights into the Cambrian explosion of life." https://lnkd.in/dssAfsd View in LinkedIn

NOT A SIMPLE CORRELATION. "The relationship between genomic complexity and the complexity at various levels of the phenotype, from molecular to organismal, is far from being straightforward as it has become clear already in the pre-genomic era." Some relatively simple creatures have much greater genomic complexity than more complex creatures. https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

THE START. "Primed to carry out the requisite natural selections, Ray's digital ecosphere was nearly complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish for "earth") and started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed "the Ancestor," it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created – an 80-byte-long self-replicating machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly language – and as it happens, it was also the last." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

GENOME COMPLEXITY ISSUES. "Despite recent developments in genomics it remains unclear why gene content, chromosome number, and genome size vary independently of each other. Is there a tendency for genome size or chromosome number to increase or decrease over time? Does genome size or chromosome number have an adaptive value and, if so, what is that value?" https://lnkd.in/dsqiJD5 View in LinkedIn

INCREASING GENOMIC COMPLEXITY. "Complete genomic sequences from diverse phylogenetic lineages reveal notable increases in genome complexity from prokaryotes to multicellular eukaryotes. The changes include gradual increases in gene number, resulting from the retention of duplicate genes, and more abrupt increases in the abundance of spliceosomal introns and mobile genetic elements." https://lnkd.in/dsqiJD5 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE ruminates on whether there is any evidence that nature operates primarily to increase genetic information. This question is more accessible today due to the large amount of data incoming on sequencing genomes of many taxa, and although very, very, far from complete, early indications give some clues to this question. View in LinkedIn