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Doubts, questions

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 way? Probably not, although I am starting to believe that the line between living and artificial is more blurry than previously thought.

Here is an example of something I saw that I can't very well explain: I programmed into the simulation the ability to reproduce if a number of varying conditions are met. These conditions make it rather unlikely that reproduction will occur, at least not very frequently. However, that is the extent of the reproductive behavior. Once an offspring is produced, it is effectively an independent organism.

During testing of this behavior, I noticed that the offspring would not always move as expected. It sometimes stays closer to its parent than should be expected. No, it doesn't always do this, but it does it frequently enough that I noticed it, and it simply can't be explained in the code. The offspring is free to move anywhere, as is the parent. But if the parent gets too far away, the offspring moves closer so that it stays nearby, and there isn't a good reason for it to do this. There is no benefit to staying near the parent. Trying to draw connections between different interacting behaviors in the code looks like spaghetti, although clearly this behavior emerges, and without a doubt it connects an offspring to its parent.

This is a little odd, to say the least. It is the unexpectedness of it that leads me to believe that I am looking at something that is somehow more than a computer program.

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