General > Biology
natural diversity VS simulated
Numsgil:
An interesting idea I have been toying with in my mind is that life is like the travelling salesperson problem. It's possible to have something alive in computers, in the same way that a depth first traversal can solve the TSP. Just don't go looking for the answer before the universe dies and protons start decaying
EricL:
--- Quote from: viplex ---In that case, I suppose, processor speed is completely irrelevant regarding evolution efficiency.
--- End quote ---
On the contrary, it's all about processor speed. The more megaflops, the more physics that can be supportted, the more complex the interactions can be, the more bot-cycles per second per sim, etc. I'm not saying DB will never evolve anything, only that with today's simplistic environment and cpu power, we have yet to see it.
--- Quote from: viplex ---Yes, I have already observed something: if nothing interesting evolves in five minutes, you maight run it for five days with no interesting result at all.
--- End quote ---
My zerbot sim is knocking on the door of 2000 hours of runtime with ~1500 bots and I've yet to see any conditional logic evolve even though I have tried to set up conditions to favor it. I'll post it soon with some observations...
EricL:
--- Quote from: Numsgil ---An interesting idea I have been toying with in my mind is that life is like the travelling salesperson problem. It's possible to have something alive in computers, in the same way that a depth first traversal can solve the TSP. Just don't go looking for the answer before the universe dies and protons start decaying
--- End quote ---
"Alife is but a heuristic search through real world NP-completeness." whoa. Got to get me some ganja to fully grock that implications there...
I agree with you in the sense that serial time slicing of organisms whose possible interactions are limited to only those coded apriori into the simulator will always be a shadowy approximation of the completely parallel and messy real world. That said however, I continue to beleive that something we would all call life is still possible in a digital environment. BTW, this ties us back to the thread a month or two ago on simulator-less bots released into the Internet...
Numsgil:
If you look at it, most of the things that life takes for granted, such as protein folding, are not things that computers can do particularly well. They can do them, but you'll always be pushing. It won't come naturally.
One could argue that life can be abstracted away from the particulars of protein folding, but until it's demonstrated the possibility that life is protein folding, et al, can't be ignored.
viplex:
--- Quote from: Numsgil ---If you look at it, most of the things that life takes for granted, such as protein folding, are not things that computers can do particularly well. They can do them, but you'll always be pushing. It won't come naturally.
One could argue that life can be abstracted away from the particulars of protein folding, but until it's demonstrated the possibility that life is protein folding, et al, can't be ignored.
--- End quote ---
Maybe its chemistry and all... and if we can make some abstraction and create some lifelike thing without chemistry, there is still a possibility that we will understand nothing of what is happening. If you know tierra or avida, with their "chemistry" being assembly, you can imagine what I'm speaking of: its hard to figure out how the simplest self-reproductor code works.
Though Darwinbots is very didactical, comprehensible to us, that exactly may be its weakness, since its language is too artificial (high level?)
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