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Ep 172: The Ordovician period

Ep 172: The Ordovician period

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

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

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

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

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…

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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Ep 167: Jets and jet engines

Ep 167: Jets and jet engines

Jets and jet engines

While doing the research for an episode on nuclear powered aircraft, I ran across a bunch of information on how jet engines work. I thought, gee, the history design and physics of jet engines would make a nifty episode. So today, we have an episode on the history, design, and physics of the jet engine.

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Ep 166: From television to nuclear fusion

Ep 166: From television to nuclear fusion

From television to nuclear fusion

In 2005, a small team, headed by Robert Bussard, built a nuclear fusion reactor. The design was a descendent of a fusion reactor invented by the same man who invented the television. The program was chronically underfunded. Though they were able to build two more models after Bussard’s death, they never quite had enough resources to follow up on their promising results.

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A monster in the realm!

A monster in the realm!

The internal i/o is a mess—the methods that allow the digital creatures to read and write to and from themselves and each other. I’ve always planned on changing it. Each figure, (one of the digital creatures I created) gets a turn, one after another, enough time to execute one instruction. But, no matter how much they are reading or writing, it all happens in one instruction.

That’s too fast!

If one figure is deleting another one, if it happens all at once, the one getting deleted doesn’t have a chance to react. There’s no defense.

I thought I’d test this out, so I did something like core war, and stuck in a figure that does nothing but empty out the memory of other figures. It’s a monster, and all it does is kill.

In the following output, each “n” stands for “null” A letter n means that there is nothing in that slot. Otherwise, you’ll see the size of the given figure. There are 4 slots, and a maximum population size of 3—if every slot is filled, the death object takes out the oldest figure. The figures that copy themselves, the replicators, are 9 numbers long. The monster is only 6. The replicators take three turns to make a new copy. The monster kills a figure every two turns.

Taking all bets!

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