----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- From: Fred Hapgood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 01 Jan 2006 13:04:33 -0500 To: Nanotech Study Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [nsg] Meeting Announcement X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 1.5 (F2.73; T1.15; A1.64; B3.05; Q3.03)
Meeting notice: The January 2 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.
Suggested topic: AL and AI
I recall as if it were yesterday Tom Ray's presentation of his
artificial life program "Tierra" at MIT. The biologist had written two
programs, an environment and a replicator, both pretty crude. When he
dropped the latter into the former and pressed 'start,' a real if
minimal ecology popped into existence in a only hundred thousand cycles
while over the same time the replicators bummed themselves down from 80-
odd statements to 20-odd.
I think most who heard that talk walked out expecting that AL would soon
be demonstrating the equivalent of multicellularity, tissue types,
sexuality, life stages, sensing, metabolism, social behavior
(hierarchies, altruism) and information processing. At least. There may
have been some uncertainty as to whether we would recognize these
complexities when they evolved, since obviously they would not look a
whole lot like their biological analogues, but I think everyone expected
AL to give us phenomena that would grow steadily more complex and
interesting.
Never happened, of course. I don't know what the mainstream reasons are
for this failure. Perhaps all the programming effort in "biological
computing" got hijacked by its function-oriented subdisciplines, like
neural nets and genetic algorithms (AL is more of a science than a
technology.)
However, just on the surface this dissappointment looks a lot like the
parallel failure of computer science to come up with systems that can
interact fluidly and accurately with the natural world, very much
including the natural world of ideas. Both AI and AL are pointed at the
same target: dealing intelligently with the chaos of the unfiltered,
unprocessed world.
Is it remotely possible that the same conceptual failure, perhaps an
inability to find the right representational language, is holding back
progress in both?
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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.
-- Jules Verne, 1865
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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.
<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>
Legend:
"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
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www.pobox.com/~fhapgood
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