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'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#71

Post by nooneelse »

jamesbritt wrote: post #69

Gripe: "artificial life" already has a somewhat lengthy history of usage, referring to emulating biological activity or traits in software or hardware. It's often shortened to just alife or a-life. It's related to genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and the like. It would be nice if the using-real-chemicals-and-alive-stuff hacking were called "synthetic life", or something to distinguish it from existing termino…

That use maybe should have been "simulated life" all along, so as to be more exact. This is a living organism that is artificially made, "artificial life" applies to it just as much as the other subject. Though the more specific terms that capture the way in which their somethings are artificial are good too.

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#72

Post by bitwize »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #26
WilliamLP wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And unless you believe in magic it is unlikely to out-compete in a pre-existing niche. Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. Not being constrained by needing to have come from slow gradual iteration might open some possibilities, some terrifying. Biology doesn't produce the wheel. To consider this as a possibility is not to believe in magic.

> Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. There's no comparison. I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car, and there are caterpillars out there that are moving faster than it. Not only that, but that caterpillar can refuel itself. And it'll turn itself into new ones next year. In the meantime, my car will sit and rust. Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer s…

But by aid of a car, you can travel faster than a cheetah.

You can make the argument that evolution does produce wheels, if only by the circuitous route of producing an organism smart enough to invent wheels.

The goal of engineering isn't to beat evolution; it is evolution at work, probing an as yet unexplored avenue of development.

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#73

Post by lukifer »

WilliamLP wrote: post #19
bh42 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luddite. In all seriousness, the dangers brought up in the article can only come from a person lacking significant knowledge of bacteria. Unimaginable numbers of bacteria permeate every part of the world, including miles within the earth, deep sea volcanic vents, radioactive waste, the rain drops falling on our heads, and us, up our noses, in our skin pores, our guts, etc. Those simple bacteria evolve at staggering r…

> And unless you believe in magic it is unlikely to out-compete in a pre-existing niche. Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. Not being constrained by needing to have come from slow gradual iteration might open some possibilities, some terrifying. Biology doesn't produce the wheel. To consider this as a possibility is not to believe in magic.

This is a good point. At the same time, bacteria have been mutating for much longer than birds or land animals, and they iterate generationally at an unbelievable speed compared to their multi-cellular cousins.

The risks should be taken seriously, even the seemingly far-fetched ones, but need to be viewed in the context of an already cut-throat competitive landscape. IMHO, the bigger risk is intentionally designing malicious life forms (bio-weapons) more so than than beneficial ones getting out of hand.

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#74

Post by rationalbeaver »

0nly1ife wrote: post #58
CWuestefeld wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. There's no comparison. I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car, and there are caterpillars out there that are moving faster than it. Not only that, but that caterpillar can refuel itself. And it'll turn itself into new ones next year. In the meantime, my car will sit and rust. Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer s…

> Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer something that works as well as what untold generations has evolved. At best photosynthesis have an efficiency of about 8% At best solar panels have an efficiency of 40%

Yeah, but you can't eat solar panels.

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#75

Post by Evgeny »

raimondious wrote: post #46
rms wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

My favorite part from that article: So that the assembled genome would be recognizable as synthetic, four of the ordered DNA sequences contained strings of bases that, in code, spell out an e-mail address, the names of many of the people involved in the project, and a few famous quotations.

I guess sooner or later the random mutations may make these string "corrupted".

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#76

Post by WilliamLP »

bh42 wrote: post #52
WilliamLP wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And unless you believe in magic it is unlikely to out-compete in a pre-existing niche. Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. Not being constrained by needing to have come from slow gradual iteration might open some possibilities, some terrifying. Biology doesn't produce the wheel. To consider this as a possibility is not to believe in magic.

Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. Fuel, jet fuel. Biology doesn't produce the wheel. Tumble weeds? Insects which curl up into a wheel to quickly roll away from danger? Can a car drive up stairs? Indeed if we genetically engineered a large animal to run on gasoline AND provided it with an ample supply of gasoline, it would move faster than anything else... as long as it had gasoline. If…

> Ebola, HIV, the flu de jour all quite terrifying, all 100% natural.

If you can't imagine anything more terrifying than those, it is a failure of imagination. See Jared Diamond's point about how when humans and large animals coevolved gradually in Africa, the animals could gradually adapt, whereas when fully evolved homo sapiens were introduced in the rest of the world 40,000 years ago, almost all the megafauna were killed off almost immediately.

> They will keep evolving and trying to kill you as fast and as hard as they can,

Thankfully, this is wrong. Diseases that kill you quickly are at a severe disadvantage.

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#77

Post by Evgeny »

0nly1ife wrote: post #58
CWuestefeld wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. There's no comparison. I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car, and there are caterpillars out there that are moving faster than it. Not only that, but that caterpillar can refuel itself. And it'll turn itself into new ones next year. In the meantime, my car will sit and rust. Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer s…

> Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer something that works as well as what untold generations has evolved. At best photosynthesis have an efficiency of about 8% At best solar panels have an efficiency of 40%

Is there a man-made process that can restore oxygen from carbon dioxide more effectively than photosynthesis? It also has to be reasonably cheap though ...

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#78

Post by JeanPierre »

phaedrus wrote: post #47

This is surprisingly like the first step you'd take if you were about to start hacking the firmware on an embedded board: before you change bits, you upload a known good firmware to prove your programming process is working correctly.

But the next steps looks more like software on a computer: You'll have to fix all those compilation-errors on first run, then look out for bugs in the software. Finally, when you ship the software, people use it and report other bugs. And since you can't update running processes at the current moment, you need to terminate and replace it.

Re: 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

#80

Post by Devilboy »

Evgeny wrote: post #75
raimondious wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite part from that article: So that the assembled genome would be recognizable as synthetic, four of the ordered DNA sequences contained strings of bases that, in code, spell out an e-mail address, the names of many of the people involved in the project, and a few famous quotations.

I guess sooner or later the random mutations may make these string "corrupted".

I hope they included checkbits!
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