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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 …
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Genetic Programming Today we take a look at my favorite evolutionary approach to making computers solve problems. This one has, now and again, produced results that are competitive with what humans can do. Here’s a link to a page about Genetic Programming, including some of the human competitive results. genetic-programming.org Here are a few tutorials …
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The genetic algorithm Your DNA has most of the information needed to make you you. The information is encoded through four different chemicals that act as a sort of alphabet, spelling out the language of life. In the 1960/s a similar approach was adopted to solve complex problems. Here’s a tutorial on genetic algorithms and …