Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
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From: A.J.Hirst@uk.ac.open (Tony Hirst)
Subject: historicAL - the backwards way forwards for AL
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Message-ID: <A.J.Hirst-260695145824@uu-igor-mac.open.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 14:58:24 GMT
Organization: HCRL, The Open University, UK
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A Historical Approach to Artifcial Life


An Open Letter to the ALife Community


My understanding of ALife is that it is all about studying life as it could
be. To date, ALife has focussed on computational media for the evolution of
entities defined as individuals within artificial worlds with predefined
physics. ALife has borrowed heavily from popular (mis)conceptions of
evolutionary and developmental biology; the mechanisms used to iterate
through generations of individuals are based on the Darwinian ideas of
selection and common descent. Variation is introduced using random
processes. ALife approaches have also been adopted in the computer science
community for solving hard or ill-specified optimisation problems.

I say again - ALife is all about studying life as it could be. This surely
includes alternative mechanisms??? (Remember, GAs and suchlike are based
on current (trivial, for the most part) understanding of Mendelian
heredity). Today, we are biassed in our views of general evolution towards
a heredity based on passage of informationally stable DNA. Coming up with
alternative mechanisms is considered as an unworthy pastime, either because
of the failure to meet the unspoken requirement of biological plausibility,
or the lack of formal proof as to the improved efficiency of the new
algorithm benchmarked against more traditional methods.

I suggest an alternative worldview for ALife experimenters - rather than
taking a sketchy knowledge of current biological thinking to the keyboard,
hacking a bit of code stolen from Goldberg, then tweaking it following a
reading of the latest biological or computer search textbook, go and read
up on 18th and 19th century theories of evolution and heredity. By going
back to a mindset when the object of study were the life processes of
individual organisms and the theories were about how invisible mechanisms
could explain the observed beaviour of such reproducing entities we empower
ourselves with the clarity of innocence and naivete (i.e. simplicity). We
can study artificial life mechanisms - life as it could be - suggested at a
time when people didnt know how it was...

This research program within a research program (if ALife has been so
ennobled) does of course require some sort of catchy label, preferably with
nifty typography; I suggest:

<i>historic</i>AL.

As well as considering historical biological theories in the sense of their
consistency with the thought of today inasmuch as they are stil true but
possibly too general to be useful, we should class all those theories that
have come to be discredited through the later discovery of falsifying
information; i.e. theories that were plausible in their time. To apply an
evolutionary metaphor, many species adapted to their enviroment of a
million years ago were falsified by evolved competition, rendering them
extinct: that is not to say they werent well adapted species prior to that
time (unless one applies a criterion of evolvability over future
(infinite?) time as a defining part of adaptedness). Which is to say that
if we relocate ALife in the biology of the past, it is perhaps better
placed to pursue its mission statement as given above.

Comments are, of course, welcome....

monty


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      | Monty          															| e-mail:  monty@watson.open.ac.uk
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