Artificial Intelligence in Byte-sized Chunks by Peter J. Bentley

Author:Peter J. Bentley
Format: epub

New Forms of Life

While bio-inspired computation bloomed, the sister field of artificial life also grew in popularity, with new ways of investigating how life might have originated and developed in complexity. Evolutionary biologist Thomas Ray had just spent several years investigating tropical biology of foraging behaviour in the rainforests of Costa Rica. Frustrated that he could not observe natural evolution directly because of its slow speed, he decided a computer simulation would enable a much faster kind of study and would also provide another example of life which he could use to compare with nature.

Tom Ray gave up his fieldwork in the jungle and in 1991 wrote a computer program called Tierra. ‘I called it that because I thought of it as another world I could inoculate with life,’ says Ray. It was a virtual world comprising nothing more than the computer itself as the world and digital organisms comprising computer instructions. The main purpose of the instructions were to reproduce themselves – make more digital organisms that inherit the instructions from their parents, with occasional mutations. These strange digital creatures compete for memory and processor time, with more successful sets of instructions grabbing more memory and obtaining more time (effectively giving their competition fewer resources on which to ‘live’) and the less successful ones dying, freeing memory and processor time for new organisms. Unlike conventional genetic algorithms, there was no fitness function to measure the quality of these organisms and enable better ones to have more children. Tierra simply let the digital organisms exist and behave. Competition for resources naturally resulted in some doing better and some doing worse over time. This really was natural evolution in a computer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.