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Yeah I guess that is pretty crazy. OTOH, there was a study of a virtual machine where someone filled RAM up with random opcodes and running the machine forward
by kanzure 11y ago
Yeah I guess that is pretty crazy. OTOH, there was a study of a virtual machine where someone filled RAM up with random opcodes and running the machine forward in time brought about self-replicating programs because of random self-copying sequences of opcodes. So maybe self-replication is simpler than we've been making it out to be?
http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20self-replicating%20computer%20organisms%20-%20A.%20N.%20Pargellis.pdf http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20se...
(To be clear, the first "self-copying sequences" didn't look like self-replication in CoreWars or whatever, but evidently they did observe the construction of self-replicating programs over time.)
- sampo 11y agoThomas S. Ray's Tierra is a very similar study, published already in 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_%28computer_simulation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_%28computer_simulation%...
- kanzure 11y agoTierra was interesting, but these days I would point anyone interested in that direction instead at Avida and BEACON. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida http://beacon-center.org/welcome/ http://beacon-center.org/welcome/ In particular this was a surprisingly interesting overview of their recent work: http://beacon-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BEACON2014AnnualReport_Public.pdf http://beacon-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BEACON20...
- kazinator 11y agoDon't also forget Conway's Game of Life.