Chapter 78 14.3 Wandering in the biomorphic kingdom

Carl Sims was neither the only explorer, nor the first, of the world of Borges's "big thousand" (some call it "library").As far as I know, the librarian of the first synthetic Borgesian world was the British zoologist Richard Dawkins. In 1985, Dawkins invented a "big thousand" that he called the "biomorphic kingdom." The "Biomorphic Kingdom" is a space of possible biological shapes made of short straight lines and branching lines.It is the first computer-generated library of possible forms and searchable by means of reproduction. Dawkins' "Biomorphic Kingdom" was written as an educational program to illustrate how designed things come about without a designer.He wanted to demonstrate visually and intuitively that random selection and aimless wandering can never produce coherent designs, whereas cumulative selection (i.e., "the method") can.

In addition to his prestigious reputation in the biological community, Dawkins also has extensive experience in programming large-scale computers. "Biomorph" is a fairly mature and complex computer program.It draws a line of a certain length, adds branches to it in a certain growth pattern, and adds branches to the branches.How the branches branch, how many branches are added, and the length of the branches, all of these can change slightly in value with the evolution of the shape, and are independent of each other.In Dawkins' program, the "variation" of these values ​​is also random.Each time you "mutate" one of the nine possible variables, you get a new shape.

Dawkins hopes to traverse a tree-like library through artificial selection and propagation. The shapes born in the "Biomorphic Kingdom" start out so short that they can only be called a point.Dawkins' program generated its eight offspring, much like Sims'.The offspring of this point vary in length, depending on what value the random mutation assigns to them.The computer displays the offspring plus the parents into nine boxes.Through selection-breeding, Dawkins took his favorite shape (it was his choice) and evolved more complex variants.By the seventh generation, the descendants have accelerated their evolution to the point of refinement.

This is exactly what Dawkins hoped for when he first wrote the program code in BASIC.If he is lucky enough, he will end up with a "big thousand" of wonderfully diverse branching trees. On the first day the program ran, Dawkins spent an exhilarating hour rummaging through the nearest bookshelf in his Borges library.In one mutation, he found an unexpected arrangement of stems, branches, and trunks.These are strange trees that have never been seen in nature.There are also line drawings of shrubs, grasses, and flowers that have never been seen before.In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins explains this double in terms of evolution and "library": "When you first evolve a new creature in a computer through artificial selection, it feels like In creating. Exactly. And from a mathematical point of view, what you are doing is actually discovering the living thing, because it already has its place in the genetic space of the 'biomorphic kingdom'. "

As time passed, he noticed that he was walking into another space of the library: here the branches of the tree began to intertwine themselves, filling some areas with criss-crossing lines, until they piled into a single entity.Layers of intertwined branches form a small body rather than a trunk.And the auxiliary branches that grow from the body look like legs and wings.He entered the insect world in the library (although his God never intended such a country!) He found all kinds of strange bugs and butterflies. Dawkins was shocked: "When I wrote the program, it never occurred to me that it could evolve anything other than a tree-like shape. I was hoping to evolve weeping willows, poplars, and Lebanon cedars."

And now it's full of insects.Dawkins was so excited that night that he forgot to sleep and eat.He spent even more time discovering the amazingly complex creatures that look like scorpions, water spiders, and frogs.He later said: "I was just wild with excitement. I can't describe how exciting it was to explore a kingdom I'd made out of my own imagination. Neither my biologist Neither the background, nor my 20 years of programming experience, nor my wildest dreams prepared me for it." He couldn't sleep that night.He pushed on, eager to see how far his "big thousand" could go.What magical things are there in this originally thought simple world?When he finally fell asleep in the morning, images of "his" insects appeared in droves in his dreams.

Over the next few months, Dawkins lingered in the "biomorphic kingdom" paradise, searching for non-vegetal and abstract shapes.Fairy shrimp, Aztec temples, Gothic church windows, Aboriginal kangaroo murals—these are just a few of the shapes he comes across.Dawkins made the most of any spare time, and eventually found many letters of the alphabet by evolutionary methods. (The letters were bred, not drawn.) His goal was to find all the letters in his name, but he hadn't been able to find a decent D or a dainty K. (There is an amazing poster on my office wall, with 26 letters and 10 numbers looming on the wings of a butterfly—including perfect Ds and Ks. Although these letters evolved naturally, they were not "methodically" Found. Photographer Jere Sandwood told me he had seen over a million wings to collect all 36 symbols.)

Dawkins is looking.He later wrote: "Computer games on the market give the player the illusion of being in a certain subterranean labyrinth of defined, if complex, terrain, where he encounters dragons, minotaurs, or other imaginary adversaries. .The number of monsters in these games is actually quite small, they are all designed by human programmers; the terrain of the maze is also the same.In the evolution game, whether it is a computer version or a real version, the player (or observer) It feels like walking through a maze full of forks, the number of paths is endless, and the monsters he encounters are not designed or predictable."

The most amazing thing is that the monsters in this space only appear once, and then disappear. The earliest version of "Biomorph Kingdom" did not provide the function of saving the coordinates of each biomorph.The shapes appear on the screen, are awakened from their respective shelves in the library, and return to their mathematical positions when the computer is turned off.The chances of encountering them again are slim to none. When Dawkins first arrived at the insect area, he desperately wanted to keep one so he could find it again at a later date.He prints out pictures of it and all 28 generations of ancestral forms that have evolved along the way, but his early prototyping program doesn't save the "background" data that would allow him to reconstruct the form.He knew that once he turned off the computer that night, the insect bioform was gone, leaving only the scented spirits lingering in its likeness.Can he re-evolve exactly the same life form?He ruled out that possibility.But he at least proved that they exist somewhere in the library.Knowing they existed was enough to impress him.

Although Dawkins has the starting point and a complete set of "fossils" of evolutionary sequences, recapturing the original insect is still an unattainable thing.Carl Sims also bred a dizzyingly cool pattern of colored lines on his CM5 - quite Jackson Pollock - but he hadn't added the ability to save coordinates then ; he was never able to retrieve the pattern, although he kept a slide from that time as a memento. Borges space is so vast.Deliberately relocating the same point in this space is so difficult, it is like playing the exact same game all over again.The choice of any round will be a slight loss and a thousand miles away.In biomorphic space, the complexity of form, the complexity of selection, and the subtlety of differentiation are sufficient to make a visit to each evolved form both the first and the last.

Perhaps there is a book in the Borges Library called The following incredible story (which is not recorded in the one in the university library).In this book Jorge Luis Borges tells how his father - a traveling reader in the "thousand" of all possible books - once encountered Have a readable book.The 410 pages of the book, including the table of contents, are all written in the style of two lines of palindrome (the same words in reverse order).The first 33 palindromes are both obscure and profound.That was all his father had read in a hurry—an unexpected fire in the basement had forced the district's librarians to evacuate outside.In the haste of the evacuation, his father had forgotten where the book was.Out of shame, he never mentioned the existence of the palindrome outside the library.And for the next eight generations, a rather secretive association of former librarians has been meeting from time to time to systematically trace the footprints left by this ancient traveler, hoping to one day find a place in the vast library. Rediscover the book somewhere in space.However, their chances of finding what they believe to be the Holy Grail are extremely slim. To demonstrate just how vast such a Borgesian space really is, Dawkins offered a reward to anyone who could re-breed (or maybe get lucky!) an image of a goblet.This goblet was something he came across during a wandering in the kingdom of lifeforms; he called it the Holy Grail.Dawkins is so convinced it's long gone that he's offering a $1,000 prize to the first person who can reveal the Holy Grail. “Placing a reward of my own money,” Dawkins said, “was my way of proclaiming that no one would find it.” Much to his surprise, less than a year after his bounty challenge, Thomas Reed, A software engineer in California reunited with this Holy Grail.It would seem akin to following the footsteps of Borges the Elder to locate the lost palindromic book, or finding the book in the Borges library, an equally grand feat. But "Biomorphic Kingdom" offers a clue.Its origins reflect Dawkins' professional interests as a biologist—aside from evolution, it embodies some principles of organisms.It was this second biological property of the biomorph that allowed Reed to discover the Holy Grail. Dawkins believes that in order to create a biological "big thousand" with practical significance, it is necessary to limit the possible shapes to a range with certain biological significance.Otherwise, even with cumulative selection, the chances of finding enough biomorphs would be drowned in the sea of ​​all shapes.After all, he explained, the embryonic development of organisms limits their potential to mutate.For example, most organisms exhibit left-right symmetry; by making left-right symmetry an essential element of biomorphism, Dawkins was able to reduce the size of the entire library, making it easier to spot biomorphs.He called this reduction "constrained embryology."The task he set himself was to devise a "biologically interesting" constrained embryology. Dawkins told me: "From the beginning I had a strong intuition that I wanted embryology to be recursive. Part of my intuition was based on the fact that embryology in the real world could be viewed as Recursive." By recursion, Dawkins means that simple rules are applied cyclically over and over again (including for their own consequences), and thereby generate most of the complexity in the final form.For example, when the recursive rule "grows one unit length and then forks in two" is applied repeatedly to a starting line, after about five iterations, it produces a bush-like shape with lots of forks. Second, Dawkins introduced the concept of genes and body into Curry.He realized that a string of letters (in a book) is like the genes of an organism. (In the formal notation of biochemistry, there is even a string of letters for a gene.) Genes make body tissue. "But," says Dawkins, "the genes of a creature don't control the tiny parts of the body any more than they control the pixels on a screen. Instead, the genes control the rules of growth, the process by which an embryo develops." , and in the 'biomorphic kingdom', it is the drawing algorithm." Therefore, a string of numbers or characters is equivalent to a gene (a chromosome), which implies a formula, and according to this formula, the pattern is drawn with pixels (the body ). As a result of this indirect way of generating form, almost any random corner of the library—or, for that matter, almost everything genetically generated—would be a logical biological shape.By letting genes control algorithms rather than pixels, Dawkins established an inner grammar in his "big thousand" that prevented all the old absurdities from emerging.Even if it is an unexpected mutation, the ending will not be an inconspicuous gray dot.The same transformation can be achieved in the Borges library.The position of each shelf no longer represents a possible arrangement of letters, but a possible arrangement of words, or even a possible arrangement of sentences.That way, any book you pick will be at least close to readable.This boosted word-string space is much smaller than the word-string space, and, as Dawkins said, you're more likely to come across something meaningful by confining it in a more interesting direction. The genes introduced by Dawkins act in a biological way—each mutation follows a structured path to change multiple pixels.This not only reduces the size of the biological morphological library and refines it into useful morphological groups, but also provides human breeders with alternative avenues for discovering morphological forms.Any subtle changes in the biomorphic gene space will be magnified into dramatic and reliable changes in the picture. This gave Thomas Reed, the uncrowned Knight of the Grail, a second breeding route.Reed repeatedly altered genes in the parental form, observing the shape changes caused by the genes, in an effort to understand how altering individual genes could induce shape change.In this way, he can derive various biological forms through the adjustment of genes.Dawkins called the approach in his program "genetic engineering."As in the real world, it has magical powers. In fact, Dawkins was the first genetic engineer to lose his $1,000 to the field of artificial life.Thomas Reed used lunch breaks at work to find the Holy Grail of the Dawkins program.Six months after Dawkins announced the contest, Reid found the lost treasure through a combination of image breeding and genetic engineering.Breeding is a quick and casual brainstorm, while engineering is the means of fine-tuning and control.Reed estimates he spent 40 hours searching for the Holy Grail, 38 of which were spent on engineering. "There was no way I would have found it just by breeding," he said.Getting closer to the Holy Grail, Reid couldn't make the last pixel change without moving the rest of the dots.He spends a lot of time on the penultimate form trying to control that last pixel. Coincidentally, and much to Dawkins' amazement, within weeks of Reed two more discoverers independently found the Holy Grail.They were able to accurately locate his Holy Grail in the space of possibility on an astronomical scale, again not only by breeding, but mainly through genetic engineering, and one even used reverse engineering.