Code center > Suggestions

Self-Modifying DNA

(1/3) > >>

Elite:
I'm sure you all have lots to say.

So, should bots be able to modify their own DNA?
Using Nums' codule idea, should bots be able to write codules?

A bot that modifies its own DNA would be rather adaptable. It would be like an extreme Endy epigenetic bot. Cospec recognition might become a problem though ...

I think it's a cool idea  ^_^

Numsgil:
Part of the problem is defining what tools you'd need.  I briefly looked into that sort of thing in this thread but I'm not very satisfied.

Another thing is exactly what bots would use this ability to do.  I think if we can present a clear idea of what we want to do, the tools will become more self evident.

Old Henk:
A bot can write new DNA to cope with his surroundings in two different ways:

It should:
* 1. Have a huge library. (not practical, gets to big)
* 2. Have intelligence capable of assesing a situation and act accordingly (this'd be true Alife. but is it possible?)What exactly would be the point of this DIY-DB'ing I wonder?

just my two euro-cents (which are worth more than $0.02 ;) )

Henk

EricL:
One goal might be to provide a mechanism for adaptability during the lifetime of particular organism.  Our immune system for example adapts over the course of our lifetime as it encounters new and different pathogens but it does this not through direct self DNA modification of existing cells but rather through the "directed" creation and selection for new cells which code for the new pathogens.  In humans, selection has favored the devlopment of immune systems which have the ability to create massive genetic varability in certain cells in certain ways at certain times.

This may be off-topic, but if one goal of DB is to over time put in place physics which can favor increased organism complexity, multibot, multi-cellular organisms in particular, then I think that what we may want isn't direct DNA self-manipulation within a single bot but rather better mechanisms to direct mutation within specific areas of the genome at reproduction time.

Imagine a complex mutlibot where different cells have specialized.  The outermost "hide" bots convert most of their energy to poison, one end specializes in getting rid of waste, the other has a cluster of tie feeders which pass energy to the rest, two bots on long ties serve as eye stalks passing back information to a cluster of central nervous system cells which do the calulations for binocular vision and tells the locomotion bots what to do...  but I digress.  :)

Say some of the hide bots are getting eaten.  Something has evolved resistance to the specific poison we use.  So, the bot reproduces new cells to replace the old ones which now poison a different memory location in the attacker.  Problem solved.  Bots have died and been replaced but the organism as a whole lives on.

We could do this today, explicitly code the hide-bot DNA codule to be able to use a variety of different posions and explicitly pass to the offspring which one to use, a sort of intelligent design in this one area, but we have no good way to tell it to do other things - make more posion than it was before, start growing a shell or making slime, use two layes of posionous cells instead of one, etc.  I'm not talking about directed DNA manipulation but rather directed mutation in narrow, specific ways.  We want the ability for a parent, when reproducing, to say "mutate here.  try something different here, in this part of the genome, leave the rest alone".  We don't have that today.

Of course this necessitates a mutation locality mechanism, so that the mutation rates of different parts of the genome can be selected for and potentially directed by parents.  If the mutation rate was part of the genome and parents could specifiy it at reporduction time, that would be a type of directed DNA modification.  

I think I would rather see work in this area, on mutation locality, than on a generic DNA self modification as a means to provide richer mechanisms for single (albeit multi-cellular) organisms to adapt during their lifetime.

Man, I cannot seem to type a short post these days...

-E

Endy:

--- Quote ---A bot that modifies its own DNA would be rather adaptable. It would be like an extreme Endy epigenetic bot. Cospec recognition might become a problem though ...
--- End quote ---

If you could somehow direct mutations to specific genes it might work okay. Maybe have some sort of:

10 .mutatethisgene store

making the gene it's in have a 10% increase in mutation rates.

Something like that anyways, would allow the specificity needed to allow directed mutations.

With my epigen's the best results were indeed obtained by "mutating" values within a relativly narrow range. The biggest barriers were the transmission delay in moving the epigen values and the massive initial number of deaths that occured due to bad phenotypes.

After things stabilize it's generally okay and the bots have much better luck at adapting to diverse enviroments. Eventually I want to have a sort of micro phenotype mutator and phenotype exchange system in the dna that'll occasionally randomly inc/dec their values. That would likely be the pinnacle as far as epigenetics go, I just need to figure out how to manage it. :D

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page