What is artificial life?

Thomas S. Ray

As I said in an earlier post, artificial life is a branch of computer engineering that builds programs that emulate the behavior of living beings: artificial living beings, or colonies of living beings, such as anthills or hives. Since I have worked in this field, I’ll tell here a little about artificial life.

In 1991, Thomas S. Ray built a program he called Tierra, where a series of artificial organisms evolved and competed for the available resources in the computer. These resources were essentially the computer memory, which was limited, and execution time. The objective of each individual was to copy itself into a piece of available memory. When copied, however, errors (mutations) could be introduced, so that the organisms in question were able to evolve.

The execution took place in a virtual machine equipped with a simple machine language, with 32 different instructions. The individuals were programs made of instructions written in the machine language. Some basic instructions were relatively complex, such as asking the operating system to allocate a certain space. Although very simple, the original program was able to copy itself (with mutations) in the allocated space. The execution of individuals is carried out in parallel, i.e. all are executed together, at the same time.

The Game of Life and the multiverse

John Horton Conway

As I said in the previous post in this blog, The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by John Conway. Let's see how it works, in a little more detail:

This cellular automaton acts on a potentially infinite two-dimensional space, divided into square cells. In each cell there is a simple automaton, or if you want, a program with two states that we can call alive and dead, or 1 and 0. The program in each cell takes as input its own state and the states of its eight neighbors. If it is alive (i.e. in state 1) and two or three of its neighbors are alive, in the next instant it will still be alive. If it is dead (in state 0) and exactly three of its neighbors are alive, in the next instant it will become alive. In any other case, it will become dead. Let's look at a figure to make it clearer:

Cellular automata and the game of life

John Horton Conway

On April 11, the mathematician John Horton Conway, age 82, died of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Conway became famous during the 1970s for inventing a very special cellular automaton, the Game of Life, which turned out to possess peculiar properties.

Contrary to what is done with most scientific discoveries, Conway did not publish his invention of the Game of Life in a typical scientific journal. It was first published in the Mathematical Games section of the Scientific American magazine, written by Martin Gardner. The article, titled The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway's New Solitaire Game 'Life', appeared in the October 1970 issue.

The evolution of the pandemic in Spain

Logistic curve

Using the data provided every day by the Spanish Ministry of Health, about the number of new cases affected by the pandemic each day, and the number of deaths, we have carried out the following analysis:

1. We have manipulated slightly the real data to take into account the weekend effect, pointed out by the minister, which consists in the fact that the figures for new cases for March 28, 29 and 30 are not faithful to the reality, because fewer cases are declared on the weekend (we are used to waiting until Monday to do it), and then, on Monday, all the missing cases get accumulated. As by then the curve had flattened, what we’ve done is replacing the data about new cases for those three days by the average of the three, thus redistributing the Monday excess between Saturday and Sunday. The following weekend, April 4, 5 and 6, we made the same correction. The attached figure represents the number of new cases for each day (red curve) and the number of deaths (green curve). The numbers in the abscissa of the figure represent days counted from the beginning of the data. Day 1 corresponds to March 3. Day 36 is April 7, the last day about which there were data when this post was published.

Behavior versus Behaviorism: Tabula Rasa and Gender Ideology

Konrad Lorenz
Nobel Foundation Archive

The theory that holds that we are a blank slate, on which someone (perhaps ourselves) should write our character and our behavior is quite old. It could go back at least to Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and actuality, according to which the human soul is born in a state of potentiality, like an unwritten tablet, and must become an actuality:

What [the intellect] thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind. (On the Soul).

This idea was recovered by medieval philosophers such as Avicenna and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and later in the 17th century by John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he replaced the term Tabula Rasa by White Paper:

For such who are careful... to principle children well... instill into the unwary, and as yet unprejudiced understanding, (for white paper receives any characters) those doctrines they would have them retain and profess.

And later he adds:

Suppose the mind to be, as we say, a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished?