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Core Wars In 1984, the game Core Wars was written and introduced to the public. Contestants write programs in a special language called redcode, and attempt to halt or overwrite the other programs in order to be the last game standing. Here’s a beginner’s guide to redcode The beginners’ guide to Redcode Here is a …
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Darwin, the game In the summer of 1961, a game was created. It was a programming game. Players would write programs that would compete against one another to try and copy themselves as often as possible, and attempt to deactivate the other programs. Here are a couple of links with more information on the game. …
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Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet I wanted to do something special for episode 100. It snuck up on me, and I never figured out what to do. I decided to share a couple of other projects, outside of the podcast. One is a blog series I’m working on, about how computers compute. The other is …
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256 simpler games In the 1980/s, Stephen Wolfram began considering and experimenting with elementary cellular automata. These are, instead of a 2-dimensional grid, just a one-dimensional row of cells or squares. At least one of these simpler games, rule 110, turns out to be Turing complete, just like Conway’s game of life. Here are links …
Previous post in topic Nex post in topic First post in topic Table of contents It’s Monday morning. I’m sitting at my desk, using my fingers to hit keys in more or less the right order. I’m using 26 letters to construct words and sentences in order to convey my meaning. Well, 26 letters, and …
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Conway’s game of life In the previous episode we talked about cellular automata, and John von Neumann’s self-replicating system. While he used cellular automata with 29 different states for each cell, a much simpler game is capable of creating self-replicating systems. A British mathematician created his game of life in the 1950/s. In 1970, an …
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Von Neumann’s cellular automata John Von Neumann began considering the idea of self-replicating systems and machines in the 1940/s. Originally, he considered actual robots, who could build other robots that could build other robots. He quickly became bogged down by the complexity of real world machinery, and the expense of providing enough parts for a …
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Barricelli’s numeric organisms Before Core Wars, or the computer game Darwin, just about as soon as a computer was built that could run the program, a rather obscure Italian scientist named Barricelli, did pioneering experiments in digital life. While his work remains largely unknown, it does demonstrate how people have been working on evolving computer …
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The dreaded local minimum While talking about various and sundry methods of simulating natural processes like evolution in order to solve problems, the concept of a local minimum has cropped up from time to time. Today, we take a closer look at it, and some of the ways to escape.
Next post in topic Previous post in topic First post in topic There was the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Good for them, all fine an honorable professions, but there was another job you could have back in the day. You could be the computer. Just like butcher or baker or candlestick maker, …