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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, …
Next post in topic Previous post in topic This is my table of lacking contents. Some of it will become links, some of it may be changed renamed or moved about, but here’s where we’re going. Table of contents: We said hello… more or less Table of contents Turing machines. An alphabet you know The …
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Computer ants? Evolution based approaches to generating solutions to complex problems, have some drawbacks. They tend to require a great deal of computing resources, such as processer time and data space. A different approach called “Ant Colony Optimization” requires much less time and number crunching for certain types of problems. The ants use cooperation rather …
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Tit for tat, thanks for that In Darwin’s original theory, natural selection was considered to be driven by competition. This presents a problem. If it’s all about survival of the fittest, and out competing all others, why is there so much cooperation in nature? In the 1980/s, a tournament was held in which competitors sent …