2 years, 9 months ago
If evolution is true then scientist should be able to shorten the time to create artificial life?
As scientist attempt to create artificial life, do they run into the barieer of infinite complexity?
Which is more complex, the brain or DNA molecule to understand?
What groups in the field of artificial life?
Which is more complex, the brain or DNA molecule to understand?
What groups in the field of artificial life?
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M$2 Answers
Shorter than a billion years... probably. A lot of things take less than a billion years. They've been working on artificial life for 0.0000% of a billion years.
> As scientist attempt to create artificial life, do they run into the barieer of infinite complexity?
No. It's very complex, but not infinitely.
> Which is more complex, the brain or DNA molecule to understand?
The DNA molecule is, in many ways, astonishingly simple. What's hard is the biochemical web that stems from it, e.g. this very oversimplified chart of cell chemical reactions:
Every reaction feeds back on itself, including which bits of DNA get expressed. And while the DNA code is itself fairly simple, the ways in which the DNA folds are not. Nor are the ways in which the proteins generated from the DNA fold. This stuff is murderously complicated, though far from infinite.
"Evolution" and "artificial life" are somewhat different topics. Evolution concerns the creation of new species, which happens all the time, from plain old breeding to genetically modified organisms. Artificial life is more difficult, since it's starting from scratch.
But there is considerable process in artificial life nonetheless. They have successfully created a made-to-order genone:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5609/1006?hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&FIRSTINDEX=0&maxtoshow=&HITS=10&fulltext=Craig+Venter&searchid=1&resourcetype=HWCIT
and found organisms pared down to a measley thousand genes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4166076.stm
which can be used to create life entirely from scratch.
> As scientist attempt to create artificial life, do they run into the barieer of infinite complexity?
No. It's very complex, but not infinitely.
> Which is more complex, the brain or DNA molecule to understand?
The DNA molecule is, in many ways, astonishingly simple. What's hard is the biochemical web that stems from it, e.g. this very oversimplified chart of cell chemical reactions:
Every reaction feeds back on itself, including which bits of DNA get expressed. And while the DNA code is itself fairly simple, the ways in which the DNA folds are not. Nor are the ways in which the proteins generated from the DNA fold. This stuff is murderously complicated, though far from infinite.
"Evolution" and "artificial life" are somewhat different topics. Evolution concerns the creation of new species, which happens all the time, from plain old breeding to genetically modified organisms. Artificial life is more difficult, since it's starting from scratch.
But there is considerable process in artificial life nonetheless. They have successfully created a made-to-order genone:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5609/1006?hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&FIRSTINDEX=0&maxtoshow=&HITS=10&fulltext=Craig+Venter&searchid=1&resourcetype=HWCIT
and found organisms pared down to a measley thousand genes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4166076.stm
which can be used to create life entirely from scratch.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
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There have been many experiments on artificial evolution (for example: http://www.tim-taylor.com/papers/thesis/), most notably the GOLEM@Home project, which used Distributed Computing to experiment with evolution on a grand scale.
The project description:
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The GOLEM@Home Project designed and evolved robotic lifeforms via a screensaver application. The screensaver randomly created a population of virtual robots on users' systems and then evolved them (the rule for evolution was survival of the robots who could move the greatest distance over an infinite plain). Every week or so a few of a user's robots moved to someone else's Golem screensaver and a few of someone else's robots moved to the user's screensaver (this feature could be disabled for users worried about security). The virtual robots contained design information that could be used to build actual working robots.
___
The project was stopped because evolution did not pass a certain complexity level, as the model was limiting its progress.
In the end, artificial evolution should indeed be possible. However, as evolution has taken millions and millions of years to get where we are now, an 'increased speed ' evolution might still take way too long for us to ever see any results.
Maybe that's a good thing, or we might end up with this:
The project description:
___
The GOLEM@Home Project designed and evolved robotic lifeforms via a screensaver application. The screensaver randomly created a population of virtual robots on users' systems and then evolved them (the rule for evolution was survival of the robots who could move the greatest distance over an infinite plain). Every week or so a few of a user's robots moved to someone else's Golem screensaver and a few of someone else's robots moved to the user's screensaver (this feature could be disabled for users worried about security). The virtual robots contained design information that could be used to build actual working robots.
___
The project was stopped because evolution did not pass a certain complexity level, as the model was limiting its progress.
In the end, artificial evolution should indeed be possible. However, as evolution has taken millions and millions of years to get where we are now, an 'increased speed ' evolution might still take way too long for us to ever see any results.
Maybe that's a good thing, or we might end up with this:
images:
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