What did one ghost say to the other?

May 3, 2006 12:31 PM

Get A-Life - an interesting read on artificial life and evolutionary computation, from the game of life (playable applet), through core wars, tierra and on to genetic programming. This approach has recently borne fruit to genetic programming pioneer and inventor of the scratchcard, John Koza, who last year patented his invention machine, actually a 1000 machine beowulf cluster running his software, which has itself created several inventions which have been granted patents. [See also: BBC Biotopia artificial life experiment, another odd BBC evolution game, Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective]
posted by MetaMonkey (14 comments total)

great post
posted by kensanway at 1:28 PM on May 3, 2006

Well there goes all possibility of productivity for the rest of the day. Dammit.
posted by Skorgu at 1:32 PM on May 3, 2006

I dont know how I stumbled on these photos...but its a Flickr set of John Conway (inventor of Life) performing card tricks.
posted by vacapinta at 1:37 PM on May 3, 2006

I don't remember my opinion of the book The Pattern on the Stone, but I remember being wowed by one story in it: 1, 2, 3.
posted by yerfatma at 1:50 PM on May 3, 2006

P.S., how the hell would you do that?
posted by yerfatma at 1:51 PM on May 3, 2006

I always wondered, if Star Trek could terraform entire planets, why was Captain Picard bald?

(And why would Shatner tell us to "get a life"?)

wendell, derailing via starship since 1999
posted by wendell at 1:55 PM on May 3, 2006

No, seriously, what did one ghost say to the other?
posted by blue_beetle at 2:05 PM on May 3, 2006

"Boo"
posted by Skorgu at 2:31 PM on May 3, 2006

Great post, but this should've been about Chris Elliot.
posted by koeselitz at 3:41 PM on May 3, 2006

Great post. I'll be doing my Master's thesis in the field of Evolutionary Computation starting this fall. I was looking at some of these links yesterday!
posted by Roger Dodger at 4:03 PM on May 3, 2006

Here at MSU the Devolab is using and developing Avida, which was inspired by Tierra, to study evolution.

One of the projects they're working on is an educational version of Avida called Avida-ED that will allow students to interactively explore basic evolutionary concepts like mutation, natural selection, etc. I helped with the Windows port of that software.
posted by formless at 7:11 PM on May 3, 2006

We are doing everything we can to develop our future robotic masters, aren't we?
posted by moonbiter at 10:39 PM on May 3, 2006

Is there somewhere you download a version of life where you can change the rules?
posted by leibniz at 3:40 AM on May 4, 2006

Is there somewhere you download a version of life where you can change the rules?

CelLab will allow that. Life is a specific incantation of the more general concept of cellular automata. CelLab is a program that will let you play with all sorts of different cellular automata. I played with it quite a bit years ago.
posted by Bort at 4:20 AM on May 4, 2006