Chapter 32 keep going

keep going Two years earlier, in June 1984, Langton had attended the MIT Molecular Automata Conference.He happened to be sitting next to a tall, thin guy with a ponytail at lunch one day. "What are you working on?" Farmer said. "I really don't know how to describe it. I always call it artificial life." Longton replied. "Artificial life! Whoa, we gotta talk!" exclaimed Farmer. So they talked.After the meeting, they continued their conversation via e-mail.Farmer arranged for Langton to come to Los Alamos to participate in several academic discussions, (indeed, it was at the "Evolution, Play, and Learning" conference in May 1985 that Langton discussed his lambda parameters and phase transitions Research gave its first public presentation, impressing Farmer, Woolfram, Neumann Packard, and other delegates.) This also coincided with the time when Farmer, Packard, At a time when Kaufman was working on autocatalytic group simulations for the origin of life problem—not to mention that Famer was helping to found the Santa Fe Institute at the time—he himself was also deeply involved in the complexity problem. researching.He felt Langton was just the person he needed to work with.Moreover, Farmer had been a part of the anti-war movement, so he was able to convince Longton that doing scientific research in a nuclear weapons laboratory was not as inconceivable as it seemed.The completely unclassified, non-military research conducted by the researchers in Farmer and his group can be thought of as putting some "dirty" money to good use.

As a result, in August 1986, Langdon accepted a postdoctoral position at the Los Alamos Center for Nonlinear Research and traveled south to New Mexico with his wife and two young sons.Elvira breathed a sigh of relief at this move.After four years of snow and rain in Michigan, she couldn't wait to be back in the sun again.And for Langton, it's a wonderful thing.The Center for Nonlinear Research was exactly where he wanted to be.He did have some computer work to do before finishing his doctoral dissertation, but it's not uncommon for PhD students to accept their first postdoc job before they graduate.He should be able to complete the full work of his doctoral dissertation and obtain his Ph.D. within a few months.

However, things did not go so smoothly.Langton needed a workstation for his computer experiments at Los Alamos.In principle, this is not a problem.When he arrived in Los Alamos, the SUN microcomputer system of the Nonlinear Research Center had already arrived, and all the cables and hardware required for installation had already been in place.But it turned into a nightmare to continue computer experiments on SUN.Parts of the computer were still scattered across buildings and trailers, and physicists at the research center had no idea how to make the system work. "Since I was a computer student, they assumed I must know what to do. So I became a system maintainer and computer administrator in our field," Langton said.

At that time, Holland and Birx co-chaired Langdon's doctoral dissertation steering committee, and he also came to Los Alamos as a visiting scholar shortly after Langdon's arrival.He was surprised to see this happening. "Lonton is such a nice guy. Anytime anyone has a problem with an application network or a workstation, they come to him. Langton is Langton, and will help them out no matter how long it takes. My first moments at the research center For months, Langton spent more time on this than on anything else. He pulled wires through walls, debugged every aspect of the system, and put his doctoral dissertation aside."

"Birx, Farmer and I have been pushing Langdon to finish his dissertation as soon as possible. We always remind him: 'Listen, you have to get your degree or you'll regret it later,'" Holland said. Langton knew exactly what that meant.He was as eager as his advisors to finish his doctoral dissertation.But even when the system was installed and functioning properly, he had to transfer all the computer code from the Apollo workstation at the University of Michigan to the SUN workstation in Los Alamos.It's a really annoying thing.He then began preparations for the September 1987 Symposium on Artificial Life. (It was part of his contract to come to Los Alamos to organize such a seminar.) "No way, it always backfires. In my first year at Los Alamos, I did something about molecular automata. Didn't do either."

What Langton really made was this workshop.Indeed, he threw himself into it as best he could. "I was eager to get back into artificial life research. I did a lot of reading on computers at the University of Michigan, very hard. If you look up 'self-reproduction' as a keyword, there is a lot of material on it. It's like a flood. But when you look up 'computers and self-reproduction' as keywords, you can't find anything. But I keep looking in the weird, unconventional articles." He could feel that somewhere these strange, unconventional writers were out there, people like himself trying to track down this weird feeling all by themselves, but not knowing What exactly is this feeling, and I don't know who else in the world is doing research in this area.Langton hoped to find these people and bring them together so that they could begin to form a real scientific discipline.But the question is how to achieve this goal.

In the end, Langton said, there was only one way: "I can only announce that there is an academic conference on artificial life, and let's see who will attend." He believes that artificial life is still a good sign. "I've been using it as a name since I got to the University of Arizona, and people immediately understand what it means." On the other hand, he thinks it's important for people to understand the term at a glance, otherwise people from all over the country will come to demonstrate the hastily put together video games. "It took me a long time, about a month, to come up with the wording of the invitation. We didn't want this conference to be too off topic or too science fiction, but at the same time we didn't want to be limited to DNA Based on the data. So I circulated the drafted invitation letter in Los Alamos first, and then revised it, deliberating over and over again.”

When the invitations were modified to his satisfaction, the question of how to send them out came one after another.Maybe it would be better to send it by e-mail?There is a mail-sending utility on the UNIX operating system. This utility has a well-known bug that can be used to make the mail copy itself when sending an electronic letter. "I thought about using this bug to post a self-replicating meeting notice on a computer network, and then make it cancel itself. But on second thought, it didn't feel right, it's not the way I want to be connected." In retrospect it was the right thing to do.Two years later, in November 1989, a Cornell University graduate student named Robert Morris tried to exploit this same mistake to write a computer virus, which caused the virus to spread out of control and almost Destroyed the computer network of the entire academic community in the United States.Even in 1987, Langton said, computer viruses were one of the topics he didn't want to discuss at conferences.Computer viruses are natural in the sense that they can grow and reproduce.Responding to the environment, they can do everything carbon-based life forms in general can do.Whether they are really "alive" has always been an interesting philosophical question.But computer viruses are also dangerous. "I don't want to encourage people to have fun with computer viruses. I don't know, frankly, if we talk about computer viruses in a seminar, people from the lab will walk in and say, 'No, you can't talk about that.' We can't Bring a bunch of loaf computer gamers to Los Alamos to compromise the security of the computer systems here."

In any case, Longton said, he just mailed the meeting notice to everyone he thought might be interested in the meeting and asked them to pass on the news to others.He said: "I have no idea how many people will come, maybe only five people will come, maybe five hundred people will come, I'm not at all sure." As a result, 150 people came, including some journalists with puzzled expressions, from newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times and Nature. "We ended up attracting the right group of people. Some of this group were fanatics, some were biting taunters, but most were solid academics." Of course there were Los Alamos and Santa Fe regulars like Holland, Kaufman, Packard and Farmer.British biologist Richard Dakins, author of The Selfish Gene, came from Oxford to talk about his plans to simulate biomorphic evolution, and Aristid Lindenmeyer from Holland. To talk about his computer simulations of embryonic development and plant growth, AK Dewdney, who had already advertised the conference in his Scientific American "Computer Entertainment" column, also came to organize Computer presentation.Tidney also held the "Artificial 4-H" competition, from which the best computer creations were selected.Graham Cairns-Smith from Glasgow came to discuss his theory of the origin of life on the surface of microscopic clay crystals.Hans Moravec from Carnegie Mellon University wants to talk about robotics.He believes that robots will one day dominate humans.

There are many other such participants.Langton didn't know what most of the speakers had to say until they stood up to speak. "This meeting was a very powerful emotional experience for me. I will never have a second experience like this. All the people are working independently on artificial life. They study on the sidelines, and Often at home. Yet everyone has this feeling: 'There must be some mystery here.' But they don't know who to turn to, and everyone in the meeting has the same uncertain doubts, wondering if Crazy myself. By the time we got to this meeting we were almost hugging each other. It was a genuine camaraderie. A 'Maybe I'm crazy, but all these people are crazy too' feeling."

He said that none of the academic reports had any breakthroughs.But its potential could be seen in all the statements.The topics of academic reports range from simulating the collective behavior of the ant kingdom, to the evolution of a digital ecological balance system written in computer code in an assembly language, to the self-assembly of viscous protein molecules into viruses. "It's fascinating to see these people go so far on their own and independently," Langton said.And what's even more heartening is seeing the same theme recur: Essentially every academic report mentions that fluid-essential, natural, "life-like" behavior seems to be the rule that bubbles up from the bottom , is an emergent phenomenon without central control.You can already feel a new science taking shape. “That’s why we tell people to wait until the end of the conference to bring their papers up. Because it’s only when you’ve heard what other people have to say that you can see more clearly what they’re thinking.” "It's hard to say exactly what happened at the workshop. But ninety percent of it was about encouraging people to make progress. By the time we left, we all felt like we had let go of all the shackles. Before that , all the words we hear are 'stop', 'wait', 'no', just like I can't do a doctoral thesis on artificial life at the University of Michigan. But now, all the words are saying: "Okay, okay, okay, yes, yes"! "I'm so excited. It's like a completely altered state of consciousness. I feel like it's a sea of ​​gray matter in which thoughts and concepts swim, assemble themselves, and pass on to each other." "It's been an incredible five days of being angry and active," he said. After the conference, Langton received an e-mail from one of the University of Tokyo attendees."The symposium schedule is so tight that I don't have time to tell you that I happened to be there when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima," he said. He thanked Langton again.He said attending a conference in Los Alamos to discuss technology for life had been his most exciting week.