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Alife Digest Number 054
ALIFE LIST: Artificial Life Research List Number 54 Monday, March 4th 1991
ARTIFICIAL LIFE RESEARCH ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST
Maintained by the Indiana University
Contents:
GA's and User Interfaces
From an old film to Alife, some thinkings...
Re: Darwinian Metaphysics (;-) etc.
ArTiFiCiAlTiSsUe
Subject: missing the antihill for the ants?
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Date: 1 Mar 91 15:56:27 GMT (Fri)
From: Stephen Marsh (PG) <spm@compsci.stirling.ac.uk>
Subject: GA's and User Interfaces
I'm a student in my first year of a PhD at Stirling University in Scotland,
and I've built up a healthy respect for Genetic Algorithms and their potential
usefulness. I have a few ideas and thoughts about this, and I was wondering
if anyone out there knows of any articles/ongoing work, etc. on the subject
of adaptive interfaces using GA's in particular, and in general about
GA's and their specific uses so far?
Thanks for your help...
Steve
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| Stephen Marsh, Dept. of Computing Science and Mathematics, |
| University of Stirling, Stirling, SCOTLAND, FK9 4LA. |
| Email : (JANET) spm@uk.ac.stir.cs |
| Phone +44 786 73171 X 7444 |
| :-) |
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Date: Fri, 1 Mar 91 16:57 WET
From: lam@cs.ualberta.ca (Chin Hung Lam)
Subject: From an old film to Alife, some thinkings...
Hi ! Everybody,
Has anyone out there seen the old (4-5 yrs.?) film TRON ? My
interest in Alife was more or less triggered by that film. The
fastinating thing with that film is that humans can be
'captured' into a terribly big computer. They have to fight
against other creatures living in the memory of that machine. I
cannot remember other details or even the ending but it doesn't
matter. There is nothing special about the computer except it's
memory is incredibly huge.
Although digitizing a human is too far away, there is no evidence
that we cannot digitize simple, real life forms such as amoeba,
bacteria, fungi, virus, ...etc. Providing them with an environment
is even easier. Got that idea ? Then here comes my questions.
Human has very little experience on life forms that do not
PHYSICALLY exist. The only similar 'thing' in history is ghosts (souls,
spirits, whatever the name).
Is the word soul/ghost/spirit that we have known for thousands
of years simply means a life form without physical dimension ?
ie, a logical 'being' like the poor guy in the film TRON ? Souls
come from a human who's physical body no longer works. Does it
mean that computers can be a heaven or hell for them ? Sounds
terrible ? :-)
I have considered philosophical & religious impacts of this idea,
I will continue if somebody can give me feedbacks. Thanx.
--------------------------------------------------------------
$ C. H. Lam $ Philosophers squeeze intelligence $
$ Dept. of Computing Sci $ from their brains and benefit $
$ U. of Alberta, Canada $ peoples. AI workers also do that $
$ lam@cs.ualberta.ca $ but they benefit machines :-) $
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Date: Tue, 26 Feb 91 16:59:07 PST
From: autodesk!thezahir!peb@fernwood.mpk.ca.us@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Paul Baclaski)
Subject: Re: Darwinian Metaphysics (;-) etc.
>From: BARRY MCMULLIN <75008378%dcu.ie@pucc.princeton.edu>
>Richard Dawkins introduced the notion of the ``evolution of
>evolvability'' in his paper of that name at the first Alife workshop
>(1987). In that paper he suggests that, contrary to his own previous
>intuitions, some form of *cumulative* species selection may be
>significant for the emergence of such ``evolvability''.
I too have often pondered on this. What does he mean exactly? My
general hypothesis comes from the observation that Chimpanzee DNA is
~97% the same as human DNA (I do not know whether it even makes sense
to have a percent equivalence in DNA, if not, please straighten me
out!). Given this, perhaps there is a considerable portion of DNA that
is read-only, that is, it has already been selected and will not be
considered for variation in the future. This concurs with Dawkins'
statement (The Selfish Gene):
>There can be a
> kind of higher-level selection for embryologies that lend themselves to
> evolution: a selection in favour of evolvability...
Considering the neoteny theory of human origin, this makes sense in
some limited way. This would also underscore Dawkins' position that
there must be developement--i.e., there must be a difference between
the genotype and the phenotype, because if there is no difference, then
this is no possibility for this meta selection to occur.
To be sure, this is a slippery concept, especially since it is an
abstraction on top of evolution. That is why I am suggesting a
"read-only" portion of the DNA that is not subject to variation--the
mechanism could be simple; perhaps are no variations at large in the
population pool for some segments of DNA, so only mutation can affect
a "read-only" segment of the DNA, and mutation occurs at a very low rate.
Paul E. Baclaski
peb@autodesk.com
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Date: Mon, 4 Mar 91 11:42:07 EST
From: W. Richard Stark <stark@kleene.math.usf.edu>
Subject: ArTiFiCiAlTiSsUe
Artificial-Tissue People?
Who is working on projects related to information processing in tissues?
I need references and contacts. In return, I'll let you know what I have
and what this letter turns up.
Topics and areas include:
(1) recent biological views of intrAcellular information processing in
tissues (i.e., collections of similarly programmed cells with primarily
local and usually anonymous communication),
(2) abstract models (both neural networks and the original Lynch-Fischer
family of models are too strong to fit current views in biology -- neither
allows anonymous communication and ...),
(3) simulations and other experimental work in computing,
(4) mathematical approaches,
(5) asynchronous parallel processes with anonynous communication in
`random' networks, and
(6) speculation/facts on the computational role of organs (i.e., distinct
interacting tissues).
Richard Stark
Mathematics
University of South Florida
Tampa FL 33620-5700
stark@math.usf.edu
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From: Marek W Lugowski <marek>
Subject: missing the antihill for the ants?
[forwarded from comp.theory.cell-automata]
All this talk of ants and my recent experiments with Computational Metabolism
(C. Langton's _Artificial Life_, pp. 343-368), a tiling in motion, make me
wonder about the utility of looking at ants through the prism of their final,
or evolved, states. After all, these states are only fixed attractors with
respect to the local conditions and the chaotic space. How much is there
of interest, computationally, in such attractors? What can you learn from
reaching them about any computation of interest, other than discrimination a
la pattern recognition/categorization in the way of Widrow-Hoff or a steepest
descent algorithm as found in simplest neural nets? That's boring...
What I think is of interest is the path taken through the chaotic
space. You may think of it as an informationally sensitive carrier
wave, a la FM-modulation. There is enough richness specified in this
path to encode a lot more than simple partition of the input space in
a static recognition problem. For this you don't even need evolution
to get started: I found out that for my tiles, which are no ants
believe you me :), for different initial arrangements, under a
particularly nasty set of rules that has the tiles leaping out of
their little selves to wrap each species (color) around each other
(you have to see the pictures...), I get stunningly different and
beautifully chaotic paths to ...you guessed it, an attractor, one
that, of course, I suspected anyway, since my rules don't change and I
designed them for a square gworld and ran on a torus one. Now, if I
could only learn how to modulate the path to effect an effective
computation = controlled chaos...
In summary, worry about paths in chaotic space and modulating them (and
representing the process as a grammar, unfolding) instead of computing
arrivals.
Any thoughts, disagreements?
-- Marek
>From marek Mon Feb 18 00:17:33 1991
Received: by iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 91 00:17:33 -0500
From: Marek W Lugowski <marek>
To: alife-mailing-list
Subject: more on ants / sub-behaviors need designing
[forwarded from comp.theory.cell-automata]
Subject: Re: Something for the ants to do
In article <16mJX2w163w@shark.cs.fau.edu> tomh.bbs@shark.cs.fau.edu
(Tom Holroyd) writes:
>If we want the ants to create some higher level organization,
>they must cooperate with one another, as well as compete against
>constraints in the environment and rival ant species.
....
>
>Don't worry so much about deciding what the ants should be doing
>at this stage; get them to cooperate effectively and new high-level
>behaviors based on simple sub-behaviors should emerge almost by
>themselves.
>
>tomh@bambi.ccs.fau.edu
>Tom Holroyd
>Florida Atlantic University
>Center for Complex Systems
>"An anthill is a queen's way of making another queen."
I think those two statements are incompatible. While I agree with the
former, I can't quite see how ecosystemic constraints reduce to
arbitrary sub-behaviors on which something meaningful is based. I would
say: Worry very much about what the ants ought to be doing (i.e., what
path in chaotic space they are to be computing) and by proper design
at first and natural selection later, get them to cooperate effectively.
I don't buy into this "should emerge almost by themselves." That's just
alife propaganda that we should be careful not to get zapped with. In
real life, the ecosystem and the pressures from without as well as from
within form a complex slippage of constraints, none of which is arbitrary.
To compute with ants ex nihilo is artificial intelligence pure and simple:
you are just defining arbitrary symbols and shoving them around, with a
bit of optimization thrown in for good measure. If so, anthill-climbing
is not too far from hill-climbing (search) period.
What we should be doing is trying to replicate a microcosm and computing
with it. This will take nontrivial amount of design and tweaking, because
we will be making up for the absence of natural constraints.
I share Tom's call for better ants, but only via a better antworld.
-- Marek
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End of ALife Digest
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