Tag: alife

Mathematical Life Forms

Lenia (from Latin lenis, “smooth”) is a cellular automaton, like Conway’s Game of Life, but with continuous states and continuous space-time. It supports a great diversity of complex autonomous patterns or “lifeforms” bearing resemblance to real-world microscopic organisms. More than 400 species in 18 families have been identified, many discovered via interactive evolutionary computation.

Game of Life at 50

Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the 4-celled block, the 6-celled beehive or the 8-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs. The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest). In 2018, there was a much-celebrated discovery of a special kind of spaceship, the first elementary knightship, named Sir Robin. Made of 100s of cells, it moves 2 cells forward and one sideways every 6 generations.

amazing that 50 years later, people are still discovering new life forms.

Modeling Evolution

Barricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life processes: a subdivision of what we now call “artificial life,” which seeks to simulate living systems—evolution, adaptation, ecology—in computers. Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation. Until his death in 1993, Barricelli floated between biological and mathematical sciences, questioning doctrine, not quite fitting in. “He was a brilliant, eccentric genius”

First cellular automaton?

But given that the Vigenčre cipher was viewed as uncrackable, was there a perceived need for anything else? I suspect that the urge to invent new encryption methods has always been strong: if you have a cool idea based on your own field of expertise, you will suggest it (after all, if you cannot break it, it must be unbreakable!). In fact, the use of a transformation of the previous column seems to be like an autokey cipher. The first real autokey cipher was suggested ion 1556 by Cardano in De Subtilitate, but the first useful on was invented in 1564 by Giovan Battista Bellaso. Vigenčre published one in 1586. Liber Soyga was mentioned by Dee in 1583. Could the Soyga automaton be the result of somebody working on an autokey method, perhaps getting the bright idea of applying it again and again to itself? It would seem to fit into the time. Of course, the border between cryptography and angelic communication might have been blurry. Maybe the tables were seen as both. Sufficiently advanced cryptography is indistinguishable from magic.

Openworm

Nice overview about openworm

“This is much more difficult to do in worms so it hasn’t been done as much, and as a consequence there is not as much data present. Scientists are catching up to the last 50 years of understanding neurons in rodents.”

There’s an explosion of data on its way and they’re doing their best to collect as much insight from this work so that they can build these neural behaviors into their model.

“We can also use some clever tricks from computer science to help us fill in some of the gaps. The good news is that this will only get easier as the tools and techniques get better over time.”