KJ16@MARISTB.BITNET (Rajnish) (03/01/90)
I was wondering what people thought of the Darwinian software being created by the computer scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles? Their approach is pretty radical and they're creating more powerful and reliable software through self-evolution than their programmers can design by hand. I guess these small modular programs they have going interact and merge with each other to create new generations that can anticipate potential pitfalls that human programmers can't. Just like we humans think about so many things at the same time in our head, the computer runs thousands of programs simultaneously and a master program picks out the ones that suits its' needs most efficiently, integrating it to produce following generations that are even more powerful. Survival of the fittest? In Alameda and Orange Counties in California, an example of their Darwinian programming is helping the county to control their mosquito population. Each of the individual program modules are able to successfully mimic the behavior of the mosquitoes to determine growth rate, etc., to find out precisely where and how much insecticide is necessary to kill itself and its' children. Instead of the previous mass insecticide bombings at 20000 sites picked out by human programmers, this software is doing a near perfect job with only 3000 sites it picked out on its' own. Pretty impressive, you think? The computer scientist who developed this approach to software design, Danny Hillis (Founder of Thinking Machines in Cambridge, Mass.) thinks because of its constant evolution that his software is eventually going to make itself so complex that even their designers won't be able to comprehend all of its' functions. Kinda like becoming God? This guy even has software working like a biological parasite to wipe out incompetent programs and therefore forcing the master program to search for programs that are even better! This parasite even looks around for viruses to kill. Instead of taking the usual route, trying to simulate human qualities like vision and speech, Hallis' artificial intelligence is just trying to mimic unexpected behavior that all organisms exhibit and using a parallel supercomputer to accelerate the natural evolutionary process as defined by Darwin. Interesting, you think? Rajnish
reggie@pdn.paradyne.com (George Leach) (03/04/90)
Rajnish, > I was wondering what people thought of the Darwinian software being > created by the computer scientists at the University of California in > Los Angeles? This is the first I have heard of this. God, I have to get out more :-) Have you got any pointers to any printed material on the subject? Thanks, George W. Leach AT&T Paradyne (uunet|att)!pdn!reggie Mail stop LG-133 Phone: 1-813-530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 FAX: 1-813-530-8224 Largo, FL 34649-2826 USA
spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) (03/04/90)
George Leach responds to the article about Darwinian Software with a
request for further information on the subject...
Danny Hillis presented his work at the 2nd Conference on Artificial
Life, held in Santa Fe, the week of Feb. 4. Lots of other interesting
ideas were presented, too.
The proceedings of the 1st conference have been published by
Addison-Wesley. The second set of proceedings will be published next
year, also by Addison-Wesley.
You can get more information about the conference by contacting Chris
Langton @ the Santa Fe Institute for Non-linear Studies, (505)
667-1444.
(I was there, talking about computer viruses as a form of artificial life.)
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet: spaf@cs.purdue.edu uucp: ...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf