Dr. Tim Taylor: Feeding the Virtual Animals and Open-Ended Evolution [July 13, 2024]

Tom talks with Dr. Tim Taylor about a number of topics: Dr. Tim's Introduction to artificial life and his particular definition of life and open-ended evolution. If you like this video, please Like and Subscribe. Enjoy!

[@MatthewAndrews-hh7mn]

You mentioned Human interaction shaking up the system. What about the system disrupting its self? In living systems there is self driven feedback loops. That disrupt themselves the environment and others within the environment or are you implying that in a deterministic system that things ultimately settle into a kind of equilibrium because the system doesn't disrupt its self?

[@drtimt]

Absolutely. I think I said that shaking up the system is important and that human interaction is a way of doing this. Human interaction is something like an external shock to the system - like a meteor strike (but guided by a conscious entity!). But of course in nature there are many intrinsic feedback loops that drive the system too, as you say (e.g. predator-prey, sexual selection, environment engineering, niche construction, etc.). These have to some extent been modelled in previous A-Life systems, but I would like to see them explored further to understand their importance in driving open-ended evolution.

[@MatthewAndrews-hh7mn]

@@drtimt My personal opinion on the matter is that an open evolving system wouldn’t just settle into equilibrium though. Case in point living fossils might appear unchanged through time but their genetics are still in motion. Just like in programming there are a huge number of paths to the same output. An openly evolving system despite having found optimal instead of converging will still be evolving alternative solutions with the same net output, form factor what have you. Life has a way of maintaining variability within the gene pool unless extremes push them to inbreeding. I guess I’m trying to imply nature doesn’t just settle into equilibrium in the absence of perturbation. The population it self creates niches through their interactions with themselves and the environment and specialists still evolve to exploit the gaps. The population in effect is always moving towards equilibrium while constantly disrupting its self more and more the closer it gets.

[@drtimt]

@@MatthewAndrews-hh7mn Yes, that's certainly what happens in biological life. There's neutral evolution (which you mention in your first paragraph) and niche construction (second paragraph). Although these things have been explored theoretically, and there have been some demonstrations - particularly of neutral evolution - in computational models, no one has yet really been successful in creating an artificial open-ended evolutionary system that exhibits these things to the extent that they drive continual evolution. That may be because the population sizes are too small, or the system hasn't been run for long enough, but I think there are various design factors involved too. These include the (lack of) ability to interact with the environment (biotic and abiotic) in new ways, and the (lack of) evolvability of the genotype-phenotype developmental process.

[@MatthewAndrews-hh7mn]

@@drtimt Totally agree. In fact Im working on that last part myself.

[@geralddejong]

The difference is that Bitcoin is NOT a simulation of something. It is something.

[@drtimt]

It is certainly something, but is it alive? Surely that still comes down to the question of how you define life?

[@geralddejong]

@@drtimtof course "is it alive?" depends on how one defines life, duh, regardless of what one is talking about. Bitcoin is surviving and will persist. It consumes energy, and incentivises humans to ensure its survival in an adversarial environment. It is not a simulation of life, but these characteristics suggest to me that it quite strikingly resembles a form of life. Does your definition exclude it somehow?

[@drtimt]

@@geralddejong It's not based upon a set of evolved constraints that generate and reify a system that has to actively assert itself as a organised whole, which involves, among other things, sensing and responding to its environment.

[@geralddejong]

@@drtimt yes it is certainly a case of intelligent design. 😁 But it asserts itself. Back when China banned mining the hash rate plummeted, the antifragile difficulty adjustment reacted within 2 weeks to restore balance, the hardware was packed into ships and went to consume otherwise wasted energy in mostly the US and Canada. A few months later the hash rate recovered and continued rising. Its substrate is the economy and the people motivated by it. Effective survival.

[@geertdepuydt2683]

​​@@geralddejongMore like a "meme" than alife. It's an interesting idea, but what is contained in the bitcoin entity? It's the GPUs consuming the energy, the disks memory, etc which are all external that keep the meme of a single string of coin alife... So... Maybe a bitcoin is more akin to a gene than to a living system?