General > Off Topic
Daniel Dennett speech about ALIFE
Jez:
Mmm, Iain M Banks, (rather than Ian Banks) Feersum Endjinn was a good book, I would have a full collection of his books if I wasn't so good at lending them out and forgetting to whom...
First grabbed by 'Consider Phlebas' or 'The Bridge' he remains one of my favourite SF authors after Asimov; I don't think I have read Ken Macleod before, is he worth a read?
Numsgil:
I'm going to disagree that naked assembly can possibly give rise to something viably alive. The problem is that in nature, when you "fault", you die. But in a computer when you "fault" you kill yourself and everyone around you (restart), and decrease the viability of your environment for future generations (user gets wary and stops downloading programs/heightens anti viral).
Beyond that, OSes are specifically designed to be not fault tolerant, since you don't want your printer randomly spewing out pages when a program writes to protected memory. Programs that do not work perfectly die. Real life is far more forgiving for protolife than naked computers.
However, if organisms strap on their own virtual machines, then it becomes a easier.
EricL:
By naked, I mean user mode code running as it's own process on top of a kernal mode OS such as Windows or Linix. I did not mean to imply there was no host OS.
User mode program A faulting will not impact user mode program B on any modern OS While your point regarding crashes alerting the user or the system via windows crash reporting or similar is well taken, in general, user mode code cannot fault another user mode program or the OS. If it could, that would be considered a bug in the OS.
Any such alerts would simply provide directional selection favoring those 'organisms" which do not crash or do not crash in ways that alert the user. One can imagine sucessful programs evolving and passing on to their decendents their own evolved structured execption handling for example.
In the end, a process is a process as far as the kernal is concerned, whether it uses some host VM or not. Opened ended evolution, the subject which began this discussion, would by definition be limited by the capabilites of any host VM and thus the only way to remove such limitations is to make the VM itself mutable and thus essentially part of the organism.
I do not claim it easy or probable or even realistic. Only that it is conceivable.
Numsgil:
I'm sure it's a bug, but I've managed to crash XP to the point of restarting at least a dozen times in the last few months, when I program various projects. I would be very surprised if a computer that decided to allow randomly mutating naked apps didn't need to be restarted, or even reformatted, quite often. Computers are carefully oiled machines that do not like things bumping where they should have bopped, so to speak.
A "virtual machine" does not necessarily need to be limiting. It just needs to provide a conversion from a mutation friendly environment to real world of your computer hardware. Think Java's virtual machine. It lets you do anything pretty much that your computer can do, but the hardware details (and OS details) are abstracted from the programmer.
Think of something like that, but to the next level. And lock out the very, very, bad things like reformatting the hard drive . You could in fact control the access to various hardware through the virtual machine (which mostly doesn't change).
The problem is that even a program like this, which is relatively well behaved, is going to piss off alot of people on the net before it ever manages to get downloaded to someone else's computer. Randomly posting "asd;lfkljasiewkasdfj;O(iasdfjlk;" to different forums, for instance, isn't going to be making it any friends. The net is quite hostile to things that are stupid. The program would need to become reasonably advanced on the origin computer before it could ever get any clock time on anyone else's computer.
There's just too many hurdles to overcome all at once for a naked alife app to become distributed on the net. It's possible that a designed app might be able to make inroads, though, and mutate from there.
I would also point out that there are far more mutations in computers than you might think. I can't count the number of times I downloaded something with a bad checksum.
Sprotiel:
--- Quote from: Jez ---Mmm, Iain M Banks, (rather than Ian Banks)
--- End quote ---
IMHO, this Iain M. Banks/ Iain Banks distinction is rather arbitrary. There's no doubt in my mind that books under both names were written by the same author.
--- Quote ---I don't think I have read Ken Macleod before, is he worth a read?
--- End quote ---
If you like Iain Banks, certainly! His style is quite similar. The most striking difference is that where Banks evokes philosophical and sociological themes, MacLeod is more into politics and technology, but Learning the world could almost pass for a Banks novel.
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