Simulated Evolution
Simulated evolution is one of the hottest topics in ALife to
date. It works on the following premise. Life on Earth began more
than two billion years ago. Initially, only the strongest creatures
survived the adverse factors of an unforgiving environment and natural
competition from other organisms. As a result, as time wore on,
species became vastly more adept at surviving in their environment.
Certain species even began to develop weapons such as reflexes and
larger brains that enabled them to remember situations and performs
tasks. This led to the development of skills in the animal kingdom.
Accordingly, in the last few hundred million years or so of evolution,
the law of the land has ceased to be the "survival of the fittest" and
transformed itself into "the survival of the most skillful." Indeed
the survival of our physically unimposing species, mankind, is a
testimonial to this.
What the above outlines is the simple fact that in a natural
environment, incredibly efficient mechanisms have been developed
through the evolutionary crap-shoot of trial and error. The ability
to survive has been based purely on how consistently an individual can
make the right choice from a set of given alternatives. This process,
called Natural Evolution, is due to natural selection, mutation and
individual learning. Natural selection, discussed above, simply
removes from the pictures those organisms functioning inefficiently.
Mutation provides the random changes in species that provide for the
development of new systems, skills, etc. Individual learning directly
links the intelligence of an individual of a species to that
organism's chances for survival. In other words, smarter species have
an advantage because they can deal with new situations and learn from
there mistakes.
What does all this have to do with Alife. Simple. By setting
up virtual environments in which programs compete against one another
in order to "survive," scientists are hoping to let evolution take its
course within the confines of today's supercomputers, allowing only
the best programs to emerge. "Survival," in this sense is taken to
mean merely the performance of a certain task. For instance, is a
programmer was attempting to write an Internet browser, under this
system only those browsers which searched the quickest and got the
most results would survive to "reproduce." "Reproduction" is, of
course, also different within a computer generated environment. What
"reproduction" entails in the virtual world is the occasional
replication and/or slight modification due to mutation that the
simulation would perform on those programs outperforming the others.
To fully understand the implications of this emerging science,
one only need look to the marvels that nature has produced using the
same process. Parts of our own body such as the eye, ear, brain,
liver, nose, etc., are far smaller than there technological
counterparts and perform their given functions with much greater
efficiency, while running on merely oxygen and other nutrients for
fuel. If computer programs could be designed to be as efficient...
The possibilities are endless.