Chapter 106 17.8 Settling down in the superlife kingdom

Artificial life recognizes the existence of new life forms and new definitions of life.The so-called "new" life is actually new wine in old bottles, using old power to organize matter and energy in a new way.Our ancestors were loose about what it meant to be "alive".In the age of science, we have subdivided the concept of "live".We call animals and green plants alive, but when we call an institution like a post office an "organism," we mean that it resembles living things, "as if alive." We (by which I mean first and foremost scientists) are beginning to realize that systems that were once likened to be alive are indeed alive, but with a much larger and more defined life.I call it "super life".The super life is a special form of living system, which is complete, strong, and full of cohesion, and is a powerful living system.A tropical rainforest and a periwinkle, an electronic network and an autopilot, Simcity games and New York City, are all super-life in a sense. "Superlife" is a term I coined for types of life including HIV and the Michelangelo computer virus.

The biologically defined life is just a species in the super life.Telephone networks are another species.Bullfrogs may be small, but they are full of super life.The Biosphere 2 project in Arizona is full of hyperlife, as are Earth and Terminator 2.Someday in the future, super life will thrive in cars, buildings, televisions and test tubes. This is not to say that organic life and machine life are identical; they are not.Water striders will forever retain some of the unique characteristics of carbon-based life.However, organic and artificial life share a set of properties that we are only beginning to learn to discern.Of course, it is very likely that there will be other super life forms that we cannot describe yet.One can imagine all kinds of possibilities for life - hybrid hybrids of living things and man-made synthetics, the half-animal/half-machine cyborgs of old sci-fi - perhaps naturally evolving from both parents The super life characteristic that cannot be found.

Every attempt by human beings to create life is to explore the space of possible super life.This space contains all the elements capable of recreating the origin of life on the earth.But our challenge goes far beyond that.The purpose of creating artificial life is not just to describe the space "life as we know it".What motivates Langton's exploration is the desire to map out all the possible spaces of life, a mission that takes us into the very, very wide realm of "life as it could exist."The library of super life contains all living things, all living systems, all slices of life, all things that resist the second law of thermodynamics, various combinations of matter that can evolve infinitely in the past and future, and some kind of Unclear Extraordinary.

The only way to explore this uncharted territory is to build numerous instances and see if they fit into the space.In an introduction to the Proceedings of the Second Conference on Artificial Life, Langton proposes, "The hypothesis is that biologists can 'rewind the evolutionary tape' and repeat it under different initial conditions, or under different external perturbations." Replay it, and they may have a complete evolutionary path to draw conclusions." Constantly start from scratch, change the rules a little, and then build an instance of artificial life.So repeated countless times.Each instance of synthetic life is added to the instances of organic life on Earth to form a full-fledged superlife.

Since life is a form, not matter, the more material we can implant into "living" behavior, the more instances of "life as it could be" that we can accumulate.The field of artificial life is thus vast and diverse among all pathways to complexity.A typical gathering of artificial life researchers tends to include biochemists, computer whiz, game designers, animators, physicists, math nerds, and robotics enthusiasts.The topic behind the meeting is to go beyond the definition of life. One night, after a midnight talk at the inaugural Artificial Life Conference, some of us were looking at the stars in the desert night sky, and the mathematician Rudy Rucker gave some motivation for working on artificial life—this is what I Highest motivation ever heard: "Currently, an ordinary computer program might be a thousand lines long and run for a few minutes. The purpose of artificial life is to find a computer code that is only a few lines long but can run for a thousand years."

This statement seems to be true.We build robots with the same idea in mind: design them in a few years, make them function for centuries, and even build their replacements.Just like an acorn, a few lines of code can grow a 180-year-old tree. Participants believed that for artificial life, it is important to redefine not only biology and life, but also the concepts of artificial and real.This fundamentally expands the realm of life and reality.Unlike previous academic models of “unpublishable is rubbish,” most experimentalists—even mathematicians—who work on artificial life support a new academic creed: “demonstrate or die.”The only way to make any progress with artificial life and superlife is to run a working instance."Every time I came across a computer, I tried to program the Game of Life in it," recalls ex-Apple employee Ken Calakotesius, explaining how he got his start working on artificial life. An artificial life program called "Simulated Life" was implemented on the Macintosh.In The Sims, you create a superlife world and place small creatures in it to co-evolve into an increasingly complex artificial ecosystem.Right now, Ken is trying to write the biggest and best Game of Life, an ultimate "living" program: "Remember, the universe is the only place big enough to run the ultimate Game of Life. However, the only difficulty with using the universe as a platform is that, Right now it's running someone else's program."

Larry Yager, who is currently at Apple, once gave me his business card.The business card read: "Larry Yager, God of the Microcosm."Jager created Polyworld - a cutting-edge computer world that includes a variety of polygonal organisms.Hundreds of polygons fly around, mate, reproduce, consume resources, learn (the abilities God Yag has given them), adapt and evolve.Jager is exploring the space of possible lives.What will happen? "In the beginning," Jager said, "I made it so that reproduction didn't cost energy. They could reproduce as much as they wanted. But I kept getting this type of guy, the idle cannibal: They like to be in the middle of their parents and their offspring. Hanging out in the corners of the neighborhood, doing nothing but just sitting there. All they do is mate, fight with each other, and devour each other. Why work when you can eat children for a living!" Which means, some kind of super life form appeared.

"The core motivation for studying artificial life is to expand the field of biology to include more species than the existing life forms on earth." pleasure. Farmer already knew certain things.Artificial life is unique among human endeavors for another reason.Gods like Jager are expanding the kinds of life, because "life as it is possible" is a field we can only study by first creating examples.We must create super life before we can explore it; to explore super life, we must create super life. As we busied ourselves creating new forms of superlife one after another, a disturbing thought crept into our minds.Life is using us.Organic carbon-based life is only the first step in the evolution of super life into physical form.Life conquers carbon.And now, under the guise of pond weeds and kingfishers, life agitates to invade crystals, wires, biochemical gels, and combinations of nerves and silicon.Look where life is going, and we'll agree with developmental biologist Lewis Helder when he said, "A germ cell is just a robot in disguise." The report written in the proceedings of the conference stated: "Virtual life is out there, waiting for us to create an environment for its evolution." In the article "Artificial Life", Langton told Steven Levy : "Other forms of life—artificial life—are trying to come into this world. They are using me to reproduce and fulfill them."

Life, especially superlife, wants to explore all possible biology and all possible ways of evolution.And it uses us to create them, because that's the only way to explore them.And the status of human beings—the so-called benevolence sees benevolence, and the wise see wisdom—may be just a passing station for super-life, or it may be the only door leading to the open universe. "With the advent of artificial life, we may be the first species to create successors to ourselves," writes Don Farmer in his manifesto Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution: "These successors What would it be like? If we creators fail in our mission, they will indeed be cruel and malevolent. However, if we succeed, they will be far superior in intelligence and pride enlightened beings." For us "lower" life forms, their intelligence is beyond our reach.We have always longed to be gods.We would be proud if, thanks to our efforts, super beings could find some suitable way to evolve creatures that please or benefit us.But we would be terrified if our efforts would create a successor who would outshine us.

Diagonally across from Chris Langton's office is the Los Alamos Atomic Museum - a reminder of the destructive power of man.That power disturbed Langton. "In the middle of this century, mankind has acquired the power to destroy life," he wrote in one of his academic papers, "and by the end of this century, mankind will be able to possess the power to create life. The two burdens on our shoulders Among the heavy burdens, it's hard to say which one is heavier." Everywhere we make room for other life forms to emerge: Teenage hackers unleash powerful computer viruses; Japanese industrialists assemble nimble painting robots; Hollywood directors create virtual dinosaurs; biochemists cram self-evolving molecules into tiny plastic test tubes.One day, we will create an open world that can continue to run and create new ones.We will also use this to find another way in the space of life.

Danny Hillis was no joke when he said he wanted to build a computer that he would be proud of.What could be more human than giving life?I think I know the answer: life-giving and freedom.Give life to the openness; say to it, this is your life, here are the car keys; and then, let it do what we're doing - let it run its course.Tom Ray once said to me, "I'm not going to download my life into a computer. I'm going to upload my computer into my life."