Tag: evolution

Seatbelt Darwin Award

As laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws. There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group.

Evidently his words were far more prescient than any of us might have wanted, as an article in the 4 January 2005 Lincoln Journal Star reported that Mr. Kieper not only died in a car crash, but the tragic mishap that claimed his life was the very type of accident in which seat belts have proved so effective in saving lives by preventing passengers from being ejected from vehicles

Forking languages

having finished the power of babel, a book on language evolution, i found the following comment on how the internet promotes “bad” spelling insightful:

Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that “Thomas Smith” and “Tomas Smythe” were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.

it would be highly ironic if electronic media eventually led to the emergence of many new dialects after having contributed substantially to the demise of most of the world’s languages. these new dialects would not necessarily form along geographical lines, but would connect social subgroups independent of location.
one particularly amusing slip i am seeing more and more is “bare with me”.

Survival of the unfit

Remember accidents? We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes. We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Will we become feeble before we become bionic?

Quines

:quine: /kwi:n/ /n./ [from the name of the logician Willard van Orman Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement.

<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″ xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”&gt;
<xsl:output method=”xml” encoding=”utf-8″ />
<xsl:variable name=”s”></xsl:variable>
<xsl:template match=”/”>
<xsl:value-of select=”substring($s,1,148)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
<xsl:value-of select=”$s” />
<xsl:value-of select=”substring($s,149)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

quite amusing, yet ultimately boring as it always reconstructs only itself. it would be cool to add in some mutation, but apparently the problem is not so easy to solve:

It may be that the problem is not amenable to being solved by evolutionary methods. There may be too many local maxima, which give fair to middling scores, but no good way to step from a local maximum to the global maximum without ever getting a lower score.
It may be that the randomprog and mutate functions produced too many offspring with syntax errors or other obvious problems, so that it would have taken longer to generate an optimum solution that I had patience.

JohnnyVon, being rooted more firmly in the (simulated) world of physics and biology, might fare better.


JohnnyVon is an implementation of self-replicating machines in continuous 2D space. 2 types of particles drift about in a virtual liquid. The particles are automata with discrete internal states but continuous external relationships. Their internal states are governed by finite state machines but their external relationships are governed by a simulated physics that includes Brownian motion, viscosity, and spring-like attractive and repulsive forces. The particles can be assembled into patterns that can encode arbitrary strings of bits. We demonstrate that, if an arbitrary “seed” pattern is put in a “soup” of separate individual particles, the pattern will replicate by assembling the individual particles into copies of itself. We also show that, given sufficient time, a soup of separate individual particles will eventually spontaneously form self-replicating patterns. We discuss the implications of JohnnyVon for research in nanotechnology, theoretical biology, and artificial life.