This issue had more about Dan Simmon’s “Hyperion Trilogy” which drew it’s inspiration from Tom Ray’s experiments in getting intelligence to evolve in what he called a digital soup.
Evolving Machine Intelligence
“Everything we know about life is based on one example of life: Life on Earth. Everything we know about intelligence is based on one example of intelligence: Human intelligence. This limited experience burdens us with preconceptions and limits our imaginations.” — Tom Ray in his critique of Kurzweil’s book “The Age of Spiritual Machines.”
One of the things I found fascinating about the Hyperion Trilogy was the concept of the “AIs,” intelligences that evolved in the information networks of the future. Not AIs built by humans to human design specifications, but rather AIs that evolved in the primordial digital soup of a vast information network.
Tom Ray’s work on evolving machine intelligence was the basis for that bit of science fiction. What is refreshingly different about Ray’s work is how he tries to escape from anthropomorphic thinking about artificial intelligence.
It is his claim that biological intelligent beings were produced by evolution, and the best way to create silicon intelligent beings is the same. To this end he developed the first Tierra program. It had a mechanism to let programs evolve, but there was no “artificial” human motivation, like searching for food, that drove the evolution. Rather, these were just programs trying to reproduce themselves, competing for CPU cycles and memory.
In other words, Ray’s work goes exactly opposite the working definition of AI for this newsletter. Rather than building a virtual machine antithetical to a computer’s nature, he was seeking to evolve intelligence totally within the realm of “data” and “processing.”
Of course, he had to write a virtual machine to do it.
His virtual machine had a machine language designed to support evolutionary change, and an original program that made replicas of itself in memory. But mutation would enter into the replicas from time to time. The result was replicating programs evolved that were much smaller and faster than the original. Also parasitic programs evolved that used code from other programs, and hostile and friendly programs.
Wow.
But his programs never got much beyond that, and he figured the problem was the limitation of a single machine. This led rise to Network Tierra, whereby the unused cycles of all the machines on the Internet could be used to house a “game preserve” where digital creatures were free to evolve.
Tom Ray’s work is an excellent example of what can happen when disciplines cross. He is not a programmer. He is a zoologist. And his interest in evolving intelligence in a digital medium was motivated to a large degree in the possibility of creating a laboratory where the mechanism of evolution could be better studied.
Based on his latest writings, it appears as if the Network Tierra has slowed due to technical difficulties. His creatures were consuming too much band width. Ray has also moved his focus to some other evolutionary software projects that more closely model organic evolution. These have yielded some very visually pleasing pictures and movies, but that’s for a later newsletter.