koffl next back Author : Jan B. Hurych
Title : PARALLAXES
Essay: THE FIGHT FOR LIFE WE NEVER KNEW BEFORE (6)



The fight for life we never knew before.

There is quite a fight going on, the fight we do not know too much about. It is a secret fight all right and I even allowed myself the ambiguity in the title of this article: it is the fight we never knew before, but also for the life we never knew before. It is a fight for the artificial life (shortly Alife or AL), sometimes also called "silicon life" to distinguish it from the "carbon" based life.

I am not talking here about the life forms which were once also contemplated, the forms where the carbon atoms in carbohydrates are replaced by silicon atoms. It didn't work, because (as I was told by chemists):

- carbon based organisms are derivatives of carbon dioxide, which is a gas, while silicon dioxide - well, you have seen quartz already - is pretty solid,
- long chains of silicon molecules are not mechanically strong enough,
- silicon is not so stable as carbon, thanks to its bigger molecule


No, we are talking about the life created in the environments of silicon chips - therefore its name. But the hardware itself is not important - artificial life is realized via software and it is called "life"only because it has all basic characteristics assigned to our, biological life. Well, maybe with some exceptions, listed here:

1) Instead of some "material" objects, we rather talk about "the kind of existence",
2) It has capability to multiply or replicate, similarly to DNA, either by cloning or fusion, or any other way, thus creating new, separate identities,
3) It can store and access informationn - even it's own, the genetic one,
4) It uses its own, shall we say metabolic process of energy or information exchange, needed for its existence - for its life,
5) It interacts functionally with its environment and has ability of independent (i.e. self-controlled) expression of its existence,
6) Its whole depends on individual parts and vice versa,
7) While it is dependent on its environment, it has certain endurance i.e. resistance to the harmful effects of its environment,
8) It has capability to change, to procreate, to mutate and maybe even evolve,
9) It can grow, expand and virtually move around the given environment,
10) It also has some other features: it can perish, die, simply cease to exist. It can attack the other living forms or adapt to them,
11) While I admit, that our professor of biology mentioned to us only four of the above, I cannot stop here and add also one rather disputable feature: it's intelligence. Yes, it can learn. That would further lead us to Artificial Intelligence, which is the related subject.




After reading all that, you may still be asking how much is the artificial life similar to our "everyday" life. I won't keep you in suspense: it is not. So why are we calling it life at all? Well, why not. We do suspect there are another forms of life in our universe, some of them not at all similar to ours. Just imagine creatures, which will perceive thermal spectrum as we perceive our visible spectrum - pretty scary, isn't it? Well, with all our success in cosmic travel, we are still like grasshoppers trying to jump to the top of the tree. There is only a slim possibility, that the present generation will be ever able to study those cosmic forms of life in its own lifetime - not unless the visitors will come to us. On the other hand, the silicon life is already here. It lives in the cyberspace of our computers, is crawling on the surfaces of our disks, vegetates in the memory and it even multiplies. . .

Yes, I am talking about computer viruses. English scientist Stephen Hawkins was talking about them when he said he was sorry the first forms of artificial life appeared to be - to his disappointment - the harmful ones. We know that some viruses already created their mutants, mostly by error, but dangerous nevertheless. And you may bet somebody is already teaching them how to procreate with certain purpose "in mind". Sure, you may claim that all this is only a "virtual" life, but we all know that the results are very real and their consequences are affecting our "real" life as well.

Fortunately, the scientific research of A-life is not interested in computer viruses, even if we can learn a lot from them as well. The laboratories are trying to create "organisms" who could procreate and evolve as well. One of these days we may even prove Darwin theory in our laboratory and maybe even predict where are we, mankind, heading to. well, you don't think the evolution will stop today, do you? The application of A-Life systems will be probably unlimited: not only we could increase the speed and capacity of our thinking, we might be able to make them smarter then we are - well, some of us, anyway :).

What do we know about artificial life so far? The answer is rather uncertain: we know only what is allowed to be published, probably only half of the progress, per my estimate. It is quite understandable: one of the users of the A-Life is the army. In one of the places I was inquiring they simply told I do not have enough security clearance.

Let me compile then the incomplete list of known forms of A-life: cellular automata (CA) promoted log time ago by John von Neumann, the famous mathematician and computer scientist, also known as the "father of A-life", the game of Life by Conway, which is also using the rules of CA, polygons (e.g. from Polyworld by Larry Yeager), actually A-life creatures, creations (e.g. Tierra by Tom Ray), populated by predators, victims and parasites, fractals (say L-systems with natural growth),
neural networks (NN), able to do their own learning and forecast (i.e. stock exchange trends), fuzzy logic (FL), genetic algorithms , simulating DNA behavior, evolutionary algorithms (Biomorphs by R. Dawkins - hello, Mr. Darwin!), and some applications of the theory of chaos .



If you want to see more details, try to search Internet for "A-life". The authors may differ in their opinions about what should we called truly artificial forms of life; some claim there is still missing the main component - without specifying what it is :-).

The interesting question is what are the possible applications of A-life. To sum-it up, they are unlimited - they may encompass all areas of our life. The first person who will succeed will reap great financial rewards - that's why there is so much secrecy everywhere. As we may expect, not all applications will be beneficiary to mankind, there will be some misuse, but that may be said just about everything.