Virtual Organisms: The Startling World of Artificial I - Softcover

Ward, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330367102 ISBN 13: 9780330367103

Publisher: Pan Books, 2000

Synopsis

British Telecom are teaching small packets of software to have sex...Telephone traffic is so huge that it can't be run by a single program, so BT are experimenting with various small `ant' programs which are autonomous and can breed and evolve better offspring by trial, error, and natural selection. The most efficient number of sexes is three, they have discovered.Meanwhile, harmless artificial life forms are already loose on the internet; computer viruses and even robots are now able to evolve randomly like their biological counterparts. Protein-based computers are on the agenda: a team in Japan aim to build an organic brain as clever as a puppy within the next year. The convergence of technology with biology has big implications. Artificial life today is evolving even beyond its designers' control.Virtual Organisms is a fascinating tour d'horizon of who is developing what artificial life around the world today. Mark Ward has interviewed the leading reserachers and developers of artificial life and has some scary predictions for the directions in which they are taking us.

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Review:

Looked at one way, all that has been achieved is some glorified computer programmes and a few robots that stagger around even when you blow one of their legs off. Looked at in another, we stand on the brink of a something that has not happened since the Earth cooled and ceased to be battered constantly by meteors--the creation of a new and unrelated form of life. Mark Ward's report from the front takes what is called a Strong AI position--he dismisses as obscurantism the arguments of philosophers that mechanical creations can never rightly be called alive or conscious. In order to do this, he takes us fluently through the establishment of life on earth and the arguments of those who see it as a constant process of adaptive symbiosis, of partnerships between specialised creatures that together become something else. His cogent argument is essentially that the various sorts of research into machine intelligence, machine perception and computer programmes that imitate reproduction and evolution will come together and produce something like life, and will also help us understand our own evolutionary history. This controversial position may be wishful thinking, but if it proves not to be, Ward has laid the groundwork for ways of coping. --Roz Kaveney

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0330367102
• ISBN 13: 9780330367103
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308