Author: thelabwithbradbarton

The first thing I learned, was to turn on the light

The first thing I learned, was to turn on the light

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I don’t use light in my house. I can’t see it, sometimes it doesn’t occur to me until someone comes over and asks for the stuff. Then I can tell an old joke that still gets a chuckle one time in ten, and go turn on the lamp I keep for just such occasions.

I put on this pair of smart glasses. They’re sort of like having a smart phone strapped to your face. I’m told the display is rather nifty; though of the two people who have checked it out, one complained of eyestrain, stinging in his eyes from the very close, slightly too bright light; and the other wears prescription glasses, so the display ended up rather blurry for him.
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Ep 174: The Devonian period

Ep 174: The Devonian period

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The Devonian period

During the Devonian, there were many firsts: the first animal to give birth to live young, the first trees, the first insects, and the first vertebrates to walk on land.
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Ep 173: The Silurian period

Ep 173: The Silurian period

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The Silurian period

After the cold temperatures ice sheets and drop in sea level at the end of the Ordovician, the Silurian enjoyed a warmer and more stable climate. During this time, fish developed jaws, and the first animals adapted to a life lived entirely on land appear in the fossil record.
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Ep 172: The Ordovician period

Ep 172: The Ordovician period

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The Ordovician period

After the die out at the end of the Cambrian, during the beginning of the Ordovician, there was an increase in the variety of animals and plants, with many new species entering the fossil record. Chordates became fish, plants colonized the land, corals began forming reefs, and the cephalopods came into their own. At the end of the period, wild climatic shifts caused the second most severe extinction event in the history of life.
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Ep 171: The Cambrian period

Ep 171: The Cambrian period

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The Cambrian period

In the Cambrian period, roughly 540 million years to 485 million years ago, most of the types of animals that are with us today got their start, even if it’s difficult to recognize them.
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Ep 170: catching up with early life

Ep 170: catching up with early life

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catching up with early life

Most of the history of life on our world is about single cells. Life made up of millions-billions-trillions of cells, (just for one critter!) only arrived in the last 700,000,000 years. Life in its single celled form got here 3,400,000,000 years ago. It took life nearly 3 billion years to learn the trick. Continuing the continuing story of Evolution, we look at the Precambrian, and the first multicellular life seen in the fossil record.

Ep 168: Let’s get back to life

Ep 168: Let’s get back to life

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Let’s get back to life

Today, I share a bit of what’s happened with my digital organisms, my ongoing experiments with some software-based artificial life I wrote, and talk about where we’re going next. The general system is very close to where I wanted it in order to implement, oh, just so many experiments. Since I’m attempting to use what I created to study and perhaps even generate intelligence, it’s time to get back to researching how intelligence evolved in the world of biology.

Nearly there

Nearly there

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Cycle after cycle, they all do their next command, like the clicking of a master clock, beating out they’re digital days.

Each little digital creature, called a figure, gets a turn. That’s just enough time to do one command. It’s been more than 13 hours, and the current population is somewhere just above 310,000,000. They were randomly generated, and used the slow internal I/O—they can only read write cut or paste one number at a time.
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It’s working! … oh… wait…

It’s working! … oh… wait…

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The system has turned into a joy to work with.

One of my populations, precodedshort.pop, isn’t acting how it used to. I have a vague memory of doing some experiment, and accidentally saving a population in that file, overwriting what was there. Yeah, I even recall how I could get it back, and thinking how it didn’t matter anyway, I’m done with it.

Right, the other possibility is that something got messed up somewhere in my system, and it isn’t running right, or the same, somehow. However, every other population is acting how it used to. Before I remembered, just now, that I’d changed precodedshort.pop, I wanted to do another test of the system, to be certain all was well.
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