After doing my exams I’m going on vacation (where I plan not to touch any electronic devices) and I’ll be back Jan 12. I hope the latest postings and the two new blogs keep the regular readers of this blog occupied until I came back.
The laboratory of intelligent sytems in EPFL (run by one of the founders of evolutionary robotics Prof. Dario Floreano) has very good multipurpose c++ libraries for artificial life; they are in the Software link under Resources.
There are also more general science libraries from GNU.
Here is a good unfinished primer on molecular biology (it’s still being written):
Here is an interesting New Scientist article about a computer simulation of dust in interstellar plasma that groups itself into DNA-like structures (coincidence?) and has a lot of features similar to living systems. This is the first example I have seen of people writing a computer program that is not biologically inspired and getting something like an alife program. And I’m sure this might happen again as physics simulations become more realistic, then we can really start generalizing about life-like processes. Here is the paper the article was based on:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.pdf
Here is a good article from New Scientist about black holes and the paradoxes that their existence causes when you take into account information. It’s an article with some conceptual information for a change; New Scientist has been getting more sensationalistic over the years with titles like: “The quantum secret of water” and just crackpot things like the Relativity drive; a microwave version of ”reactionless propulsion” (this might be possible but not in the way the article describes it) . Some comments from the editor about the last article are here. I remember reading popular mechanics and popular science when I was younger and learning something instead of reading 100 advertisements.
I just found a good paper from the Entropy Journal called: Self-Organization of Template-Replicating Polymers and the Spontaneous Rise of Genetic Information. When I read it I was surprised how original it is and how simple open-ended systems might be. It also makes you think that a sytem that displays open-ended evolution might not be possible in a computer but in a mechanical system. Maybe there is something about electromagnetic fields and fluid flow that can’t be recreated in a computer. Probably not and it’s more a question of when but it’s a possibility. It is obiously possible using chemistry because it happened already so I won’t be surprised when Mark Bedau does it.
This is one of the most original ideas I have seen in a while. It’s also an example of a usefull analog computer used after the 1950s. Below are parts 1 and 2 of the video in the website showing most of the information about the device (there are no papers or plans there) . The website is here.
