Jelly Shack

I've successfully tested trait inheritance in my water peas. This happens quicker the more frequently that reproduction occurs, so I set their reproductive rate very high and then constructed an environment in which, if any peas were to survive, they would have to evolve. In order to eat, they would have to pass through a small hole. Needless to say, many water peas died of starvation because they were too big to fit through the hole. But not all. It didn't take long until I noticed that the entire population of water peas was smaller than the earlier generations. That trait, being the only one that was heavily favored by the environment, ended up expressing itself the most strongly. Those that were able to eat were able to survive long enough to reproduce. Interesting!

It happened again. If you don't know, I'm working on a simulation of a water bug (it looks more like a round pea than a bug) that lives in water but needs to surface to breathe oxygen. I have mentioned weird behavior before that I won't go into here. I realize it must be explained by the interaction of a number of different behaviors, which, because of the growing complexity, makes it hard to predict exactly how the program will behave. In order to "breathe", the water pea simply has to surface periodically. The code simply says that when it's time to breathe, then surface. This sounds simple enough, but today during testing, one of the water peas simply drowned. It never even made an attempt to swim to the surface. That may not sound so unusual, but it has happened exactly once. It should never happen. It never has happened before or since, and I can't reproduce it. So, there's that. I guess it shouldn't be so surprising; as I've said...

These are some thoughts on Trigonometry that I wanted to write down, and someone, somewhere may want to read. But probably not. If you're not into it, turn back immediately. In a top-down view on a two dimensional plane, you can face any direction and move in a forward direction by moving on the x-axis by the cosine of your rotation and moving on the y-axis by the sine of your rotation. This seems to require a physical orientation in the world, but this physical limitation is only on the surface. We can take one step back and use these abilities in more subtle ways. Imagine a side view on a plane in which you can move left and right, and jump up and fall back down to the ground. Let us first think of the left and right movement in terms of trigonometry. Facing right means 0 degrees and so we can move on x by the cosine of our rotation. Facing left is 180 degrees, and we move on x by the cosine of our rotation. Let's maintain a logical rotation factor called xf . When sta...

I mentioned in an  earlier post  that I observed what I would classify as a living artificial life in a simulation I've been working on. Already, and understandably, someone has brought up objections doubting my claims. Or rather, doubts that any computer program could be considered "life". I have always shared the same doubts, but it's not easy to remain skeptical after seeing with your own eyes. Rather than simply talk about it, I will probably release a version of this program so that other people can judge for themselves. A mobile app is probably the best way to reach many people easily. There is work to be done so that I can make the simulation presentable. I can still see doubts being raised, though. If you saw a bug walking around on the floor, and run away from you as it detects your presence, you would recognize that the bug is alive, without question. But if you saw the same behavior, the same complexity, on a computer screen, would you feel the same wa...

A quick note on thoughts I have had recently regarding the difference between a living creature and a computer program. Namely, what are those differences? If an artificial life, let's call it a program, terminates, is it correct to say that it is dead? When the program starts up, is it being born? In some sense, yes. But something has been missing. It has kept me from being convinced that a program could ever be considered life. I think that missing link is state. When you go to bed at night, your conscious thought process stops, but your state, all of the acquired experiences and memories that make you unique, is saved. Upon waking, your state is restored so that what makes you "you" remains, and you go on as a single continuous flow of execution, or, consciousness. Without state, we would be like a program that starts and stops. Too frequent and too simple to be thought of as a living being. I think that state is a large missing component that is required if we ...

Artificial behavior is an area of research that seems to have been missed, or skipped over, on the path that companies like Google are taking to develop artificial intelligence. They have also jumped straight to working on human intelligence. Why not start smaller first? What about a cat or dog, or an insect? An insect may not seem very intelligent, and companies are probably not interested because they can't make much use of an artificial insect intelligence, but simple insects are quite complex. It is also quite probable that they have a consciousness, the thing that makes them "alive". Though we don't know what consciousness is, it is thought to arise naturally as a result of the complexity of the brain. The interesting thing is that, if this is so (and it likely is), then there is no difference between a "live" human and an artificial human, a computer program that mimics the human brain. They are the same thing. We can say the same, then, of someth...