Tierra was the first thing that came to my mind, too. I'd already played with "Core War" [0] when I learned about Tierra. I so badly wanted to implement something like Tierra myself. I couldn't wrap my head around how I could identify the metes and bounds of a given "organism" to isolate it from the rest of the "soup".
At the time I learned about Tierra I didn't have a way to get at any of Ray's papers or code. Now I do, but I'd kinda forgotten about it. I really should revisit it. There's probably a lot of fun to be had there.
Aside: Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[1] was where I learned about Tierra. That book, along with Levy's "Hackers"[2], and Gleick's "Chaos"[3] were formative books for young me.
Yes basically, but more like Core Wars. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, I really don't see anything new here or the point of this news release.
"This research is far from the first attempt at mimicking life digitally: for example, simulations such as the Game of Life, which has a grid of cells that are either “alive” or “dead” and are governed by simple rules, have shown self-replicating behaviour. Laurie says what makes this work unique is that the system had no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life – it simply arrived. “It all fizzes around and then suddenly: boom, they’re all the same,” he says."
Still not sure if that means it's significant or not. Cool none the less though.
It's not. It's completely expected. People have been using genetic evolution for Core Wars for decades. This isn't any different. Of course something will eventually replicate. There will be overwrites of the copies from other organisms etc that will mutate it. Only way I could see this being surprising is if I was an 18 year old intern who has never played with something like this before. This isn't bringing anything new to the table.
Of course, but this is not new in any way. I was playing with similar stuff in the 90s so I'm confused as to why Google is reporting this as anything new. Someone's personal blog? I get it. Google? This shouldn't be news to them.
Given that the game of life also has "no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life", this Laurie person is very wrong or very misquoted.
"This research is far from the first attempt at mimicking life digitally: for example, simulations such as the Game of Life, which has a grid of cells that are either “alive” or “dead” and are governed by simple rules, have shown self-replicating behaviour. Laurie says what makes this work unique is that the system had no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life – it simply arrived. “It all fizzes around and then suddenly: boom, they’re all the same,” he says."
Another user posted a link to the full (non paywalled) article, it's worth a read. It also presents a few critic views.
There are older games (don't have my steam account on my work computer) that have much simpler starting states but they are abandoned or just not worth the price.
"I wrote a program to evolve life" is a super popular toy programming challenge as well, and you can find good and bad examples on youtube.
Here's a direct link to the paper. I have not read it yet but the abstract reminds me of a recent post discussing using brainfuck as a way to do program synthesis.
> “My gut feeling is that if you want more interesting behaviour [...] – it’s going to require so much compute that we’re not going to practically do it,” says Laurie.
> Indeed, many of the team’s experiments ran for millions of steps [...]. Laurie says that one instance, running on his laptop, involved processing about 3 billion instructions a second and it still took around half an hour for self-replication to emerge.
This almost reads as satire.
In this day and age, 30 minutes on a single laptop doesn't quite trigger my sense of "it's going to be really hard to scale further than this".
Napkin math says the team in the next building over at Google is routinely running experiments that use roughly 20 billions time more compute (90 days on 25k A100 GPUs).
I'm sure they could, at least, leave the trusty laptop on for a week end?
What the French team from Inria is doing behind Lania Flow is much more impressive, here we are talking about a game of life on a convolutional system capable of generating single-cell cells for chemotaxis, replication and natural selection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAJIETmC-6o
This has some similarities to the "Bluedogs" artificial life simulation that I made during university: https://www.tamale.net/bluedogs/ . In Bluedogs, each entity has bytecode which determines its behavior. The simulation churns out random entities which don't know how to move. Finally, it generates one that can turn and its progeny quickly fill the virtual world. Bluedogs also uses color to show geneology.
Having read the paper (and having begun replicating the results in Ruby), I _think_ the novelty here is that 1) the "world" is seeded with a normal distribution of random (though valid BF) noise and 2) there are no world rules that should incentivize replicators. The rules of engagement are the sharing of a resources (the "tape") between two programs and the VM executing BFF. My intuition would think we'd end up with the same distribution of randomness in most cases, however, the researches consistently discovered dominant replicators.
I'm excited to read more about Tierra and others prior art to understand if observation has precedent. My introduction to all of this is Shiffman's Nature of Code, so I am not familiar with the literature.
The other new research introduced in the paper was the way the BFF VM and "tapes" were observed. By using entropy and compressibility, the authors observe complexity as a heuristic for presence of self-replication in the "primordial soup" simulation.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 89.8 ms ] threadhttps://tomray.me/tierra/
At the time I learned about Tierra I didn't have a way to get at any of Ray's papers or code. Now I do, but I'd kinda forgotten about it. I really should revisit it. There's probably a lot of fun to be had there.
Aside: Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[1] was where I learned about Tierra. That book, along with Levy's "Hackers"[2], and Gleick's "Chaos"[3] were formative books for young me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/...
Genius. Thanks!
https://tomray.me/Video/Tierra.html
Is this just like running the game of life [1] on a giant random board and seeing some generators emerge? Or something actually significant?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
"This research is far from the first attempt at mimicking life digitally: for example, simulations such as the Game of Life, which has a grid of cells that are either “alive” or “dead” and are governed by simple rules, have shown self-replicating behaviour. Laurie says what makes this work unique is that the system had no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life – it simply arrived. “It all fizzes around and then suddenly: boom, they’re all the same,” he says."
Still not sure if that means it's significant or not. Cool none the less though.
"This research is far from the first attempt at mimicking life digitally: for example, simulations such as the Game of Life, which has a grid of cells that are either “alive” or “dead” and are governed by simple rules, have shown self-replicating behaviour. Laurie says what makes this work unique is that the system had no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life – it simply arrived. “It all fizzes around and then suddenly: boom, they’re all the same,” he says."
Another user posted a link to the full (non paywalled) article, it's worth a read. It also presents a few critic views.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/396890/Gridworld/
Many others mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_simulation_game
There are older games (don't have my steam account on my work computer) that have much simpler starting states but they are abandoned or just not worth the price.
"I wrote a program to evolve life" is a super popular toy programming challenge as well, and you can find good and bad examples on youtube.
Here's a direct link to the paper. I have not read it yet but the abstract reminds me of a recent post discussing using brainfuck as a way to do program synthesis.
Computational Life: How self-replicating programs emerge from simple interaction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820022 - June 2024 (17 comments)
> Indeed, many of the team’s experiments ran for millions of steps [...]. Laurie says that one instance, running on his laptop, involved processing about 3 billion instructions a second and it still took around half an hour for self-replication to emerge.
This almost reads as satire. In this day and age, 30 minutes on a single laptop doesn't quite trigger my sense of "it's going to be really hard to scale further than this".
Napkin math says the team in the next building over at Google is routinely running experiments that use roughly 20 billions time more compute (90 days on 25k A100 GPUs).
I'm sure they could, at least, leave the trusty laptop on for a week end?
> Only way I could see this being surprising is if I was an 18 year old intern who has never played with something like this before.
I'm excited to read more about Tierra and others prior art to understand if observation has precedent. My introduction to all of this is Shiffman's Nature of Code, so I am not familiar with the literature.
The other new research introduced in the paper was the way the BFF VM and "tapes" were observed. By using entropy and compressibility, the authors observe complexity as a heuristic for presence of self-replication in the "primordial soup" simulation.