[clue-talk] The Coming Storm? Nano/AI/Skynet

[Timothy Klein]

On 9 Mar 2005, at 9:40 PM, Jed S. Baer wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 02:22:56 -0700
> Timothy Klein wrote:
>
>> Artificial life is a great topic.  I read _The Age of Spiritual
>> Machines_, though, and can't recommend it.
>
> Any particular reason? I admit, Kurzweil has a sort of evangelical 
> tone,
> and his future prophecies are just that. But overall, I thought it was 
> OK.

That comes pretty close to my complaint.  He starts with very plausible 
assertions on things, but then wanders off into pure, unadulterated 
speculation, and his tone indicates that he seems to really believe 
that he has it exactly right.  Don't get me wrong -- I like reading 
about the things he predicts, I am a big science fiction fan, so most 
of it was somewhat familiar.  But I just felt a bit silly reading this 
guy.  I expected more tempering of his speculation with fact and 
analysis.

It was interesting to find out that Microsoft's virtual memory 
algorithm is supposedly machine-developed by natural selection, at 
least in part.  Both because it is(was) so bad, and because others have 
done it so much better by hand.

>> There are also several packages you can get for *nix to do your own
>> artificial life simulations.
>
> Care to recommend any? I haven't researched this much. What I found for
> Conway's game of life was disappointing, although it's been long enough
> since I tried it out, I don't remember exactly why.

I seem to have deleted that bookmark folder, so I don't remember which 
package I had. I think this *might* have been it:

http://www.swarm.org/index.html

It is a programming package, if I remember right.  I really wanted to 
code up some artificial life simulations, like little Darwinian 
environments, but I never got around to it, as it is a lot of work.

The first file on the Debian Unstable Packages page for science is 
called Achilles, which deals with AL.

(This page had a lot of links:

http://www.it.uom.gr/pdp/DigitalLib/ALife/Al_soft.htm)

On a related but odd note, Dan Simmon's novels _Endymion_ and _The Rise 
of Endymion_ have a decent synopsis of research on AL in computers (as 
of its publication in the early 90s).  It is one of those "history of 
the future" things that talks about current research.  Those two books 
are sequels to _Hyperion_ and _The Fall of Endymion_, so there are 
certainly much better ways to research the subject.  Those are good 
books, though, particularly the Hyperion ones.

Tim
--
Timothy Klein: tecce at silverklein.net
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Hello_World.c:  17 Errors, 31 Warnings