<<

INTELLIGENCER

Features Editor: Crystal R. Chweh, [email protected]

• Alife attempts to simulate

e-business

• NASA could help patients walk

Artificial intelligence experiments that the scientific method says we must do—but cannot with the time and/or spatial scales of material structures as it could be: like cells themselves.” Alife purports to shed light on our understanding of “life as it could be” by Alife attempts to simulate synthesizing it in artificial media, in the same way that chemical synthesis aided evolution chemists in developing a fundamental set of laws in that field. A century ago, chem- By Nancy Forbes ists’ attempts to understand how matter behaved were limited to what they could glean from the analysis of chemical reac- tions they performed on readily available Artificial life explores natural life by attempting to create substances. “To have a theory of the ac- biological phenomena in computers and other nonliving tual, it is necessary to understand the pos- sible,” remarked Chris Langton, one of the media. Alife also strives to introduce a broader, more universal founders of Alife, in the introduction to his understanding of life—accessible to new kinds of manipula- first book on the subject.1 However, by developing the capability to synthesize tion and testing—than that defined by traditional . new chemicals not found in , scien- tists have not only greatly extended their Looked at in this way, Alife represents would inevitably have to develop this way. empirical basis for study and their under- the flip side of the empiricalÐanalytic ap- Couldn’t silicon-based life or germanium- standing of underlying theory, but have proach of most laboratory biologists, who based life exist somewhere? While provid- also produced substances such as plastic, start with a whole organism, deconstruct it ing considerable fodder for science fiction rubber, and certain pharmaceuticals that into its component parts (for example or- writers, this question has arisen for tradi- have proved extremely useful to society. gans, tissues, cells, genes, molecules, and tional evolutionary biologists and Alife Alife proponents generally consider the so on), and then try to derive its fundamen- researchers alike. According to the latter, field to have arisen from the initial efforts of tal principles. Most biologists would prefer the study of carbon-based life here on earth Langton, an autodidact who was preoccu- to be able to simply reverse engineer life constitutes a special case and gives neces- pied with these questions throughout the and synthesize real organisms, cookbook sary but not sufficient information for for- style, from their basic ingredients, but so mulating the basic principles of life as far, this feat has eluded them. shared by all living on all planets. To uncover these principles, they feel, it Non-carbon-based life? would be necessary to explore the space of Biology is the exploration of life on all possible biologies, by studying many earth. Despite its vast and different life forms. But until aliens show diversity this remarkable phenomenon up here on earth for this purpose, most Alife given to us by nature nonetheless results scientists feel that the artificial from a series of historical accidents that of life can bring us closer to that goal. occurred through a causal chain of events. Says the ’s John Casti: Although the production of life on earth “I think Alife will ultimately enable us to Figure 1: A picture of a Golem project’s computer- followed a path based on carbon-chain properly understand evolution and the work- designed evolvable , which pushes itself along chemistry, some scientists legitimately ings of cellular machinery, mostly because it the carpet using the piston at the center. (Source: The question whether, on any other planet, life will offer us the chance to do the kinds of Golem Project at Brandeis University).

2 IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS Synapse Neuron Linear actuator seventies. The first workshop on Alife (the Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthe- Bar sis and Simulation of Artificial Life), spon- Control (brain) sored by Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Santa Fe Institute, and Apple Computer, Morphology officially gave “birth” to the field in Sep- Ball joint (body) tember 1987.2 You can find, however, pre- cursors for this field in both Turing’s and Infinite plane von Neumann’s work on automata.

Alife for individual entities Alife encompasses many disciplines, such as engineering, , biology, physics, chemistry, sociology, and even eco- nomics. In his textbook on subject, Caltech’s Chris Adami defines Alife research as a con- Figure 2. A schematic illustration of The Golem project’s evolvable robot. Bars and actuators were used as building tinuum with the simulationÐemulation of blocks of structure, and artificial neurons as building blocks of control. Bars connected with free joints can potentially individual entities at one end. As an example, form trusses that represent arbitrary rigid, flexible, and articulated structures and emulate revolute, linear, and planar he gives Karl Sims’s simulation of the evolu- joints at various levels of hierarchy. Similarly, sigmoidal neurons can connect to create arbitrary control architectures tion of the form and movements of swim- such as feed-forward and recurrent nets, state , and multiple independent controllers. Neurons were allowed ming behavior in virtual animals made from to connect to bars, similar to real neurons that govern the contraction of muscle tissue. blocks, and how competitive behavior devel- ops in these creatures.3 An analogous example in engineering Polluck, the parent bots consist of a com- each wasp really “knowing” what it’s build- would be the construction of adaptive, puter running an evolutionary ing.7 Craig Reynolds’ work on flocking birds, autonomous , which can interact that produces a design based on trial and offers another example. Reynolds created a with their environment, evolve, and learn error and a 3D printer that makes small virtual flock of birds, called boids,which from it—as exemplified by the robotic plastic shapes. The offspring are small flew according to three rules: crickets developed by Barbara Web’s group plastic trusses with actuators, propelled by • Always avoid collisions with your neighbors. 4 at the University of Edinburgh. This motors and controlled by artificial neural • Always try to fly at the same speed as your method takes a bottom-up approach,in nets (see Figures 1 and 2). Humans inter- neighbors. which developers construct a robotic sys- vene only to attach the motors and connect • Always try to stay close to your neighbors. tem from simple elemental units that— the wires—the robots do all the rest, through evolution, , and adapta- including telling the humans what to do. These three rules sufficed to create the tion to their environments—expand into emergence of flocking behavior. The boids more complex systems. Emergent behavior flew as a coherent group and automatically Robots constructed with artificial intelli- At the other end of the Alife spectrum, split into two groups when encountering an gence, on the other hand, employ a top- Adami places the study of the emergent prop- obstacle, reuniting after it was passed down approach, where developers start by erties of living populations, which display through. This demonstrates how a targeting a complex behavior (such as properties that can’t be seen in the individual system of fairly simple elements—interact- walking up steps) and build the system units’ behavior. (For example, in physics, ing with their nearest neighbors, with no with all the elements it needs to achieve temperature and pressure exemplify emer- central direction—can create cohesive, intel- this behavior. What’s more, AI has tradi- gent behaviors that occur in large systems of ligent group behavior. In fact, the behavior tionally focused on machines achieving interacting molecules. An individual mole- of Reynold’s boids precisely emulates what complex, multifaceted human functions, cule has neither temperature nor pressure by we observe in nature. such as chess playing, voice comprehen- itself.) According to Adami, these living sys- sion, or medical diagnosis. Conversely, tems aren’t amenable to a statistical descrip- Life on Tierra Alife looks exclusively at natural behav- tion in terms of macroscopic variables, so he Somewhere in between these two extremes iors, emphasizing survivability, evolution, substitutes describing them in parallel to lies Tom Ray’s Tierra project, which seeks to and reproduction of the “creature” in com- show emergent behavior. However, even the explore open-ended evolution in a virtual plex, dynamic environments. latter approach falls short because parallelism world, unfolding without any a priori human The Golem (genetically organized life- can’t capture the self-organization seen in instructions. Ray modeled Tierra on the per- like electro-mechanics) project at Brandeis many and because the result- iod in Earth’s evolution known as the Cam- University presents an even more fascinat- ing emergent behavior can often affect its brian Era, about 600 million years ago. The ing example of engineered virtual life, members in nonlinear ways.6 period began with the existence of simple, involving robots that can actually design Examples of this include swarm intelli- self-replicating organisms, which underwent and build other robots.5 Devised by com- gence that emerges, for example, when wasps explosive growth over time to result in the puter scientists Hod Lipson and Jordan build large structures, such as nests, without great species diversity known today.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2000 3 IEEE

& their applications

IEEE Computer Society Publications Office 10662 Los Vaqueros Circle, PO Box 3014 Los Alamitos, CA 90720-1314

STAFF Group Managing Editor Dick Price [email protected] Associate Editor Dennis Taylor [email protected] Managing Editor Dale Strok Features Editor Crystal Chweh Staff Editors Cheryl Baltes, Jenny Ferrero, and Shani Murray Magazine Assistants 80 45 81 17 140 78 82 125 28 others 0.0500 0.0472 0.0181 0.0167 0.0139 0.0043 0.0049 0.0047 0.0049 0.0250 Dawn Craig and Angela Williams Contributing Editors Figure. 3: An evolutionary race between hosts and parasites in a primordial soup of the Tierra program. Each image Nancy Forbes, Marti Hearst, represents a soup of 60,000 bytes, divided into 60 segments of 1,000 bytes each. A colored bar represents each indi- Paula Powers, Keri Schreiner, and Gil Shif vidual creature. Colors correspond to size (for example, red = 80, yellow = 45, blue = 79). In this image, Design Director hosts (red) are very common. Parasites (yellow) have also appeared but are still rare. (Photo: Marc Cygnus) Toni Van Buskirk Layout/Technical Illustrations Ray wanted to investigate how self-repli- tion, and so on—killing organisms when Alex Torres and Carmen Flores-Garvey cation eventually produced such complex, they reach the top of the queue; and • doling out random mutations in the binary Interim Executive Director varied life forms. He started with a single Anne Marie Kelly organism called the Ancestor, the only engi- string of each organism’s program, thus causing some organisms to self-replicate neered life form in Tierra. He then let the Publisher imperfectly.8 Angela Burgess creature loose and watched to see what hap- pened. After only one night, his virtual Ray, currently a zoology and computer Membership/Circulation Marketing Manager world was teeming with myriad creatures, science professor at the University of Okla- Georgann Carter displaying an amazing variety of form and homa, first attempted Tierra in January Advertising Staff Sandy Aijala, Marian Anderson, and Debbie Sims behavior. These organisms and their prog- 1990. After over 500 million instructions, eny (the “organisms” are actually self-repro- Tierra had created over 350 different sizes Submissions: Submit two copies of all articles and track proposals to Intelligent Systems, Magazine Assistant, 10662 Los Vaqueros ducing programs written in assembler lan- of life forms, 93 of which had survived to Circle, Los Alamitos, CA 90720-1314, phone +1 714 821 8380, guage) competed for the natural resources of achieve subpopulations of five or more [email protected]. Manuscripts should be approximately 5,000 words long, preferably not exceeding 10 references. Visit their world—that is, CPU time and memory. individuals. Tierra also generated hosts and computer.org/intelligent for editorial guidelines. This provided the basis for parasites, and eventually a type of social Editorial: Unless otherwise stated, bylined articles as well as to operate—some organisms die off and the organization with communities of geneti- products and services reflect the author’s or firm’s opinion; inclusion fitter ones survive, adapt, and become more cally uniform organisms. Nearly every does not necessarily constitute endorsement by the IEEE Computer Society or the IEEE. competitive. facet of natural evolution and known life- Circulation: IEEE Intelligent Systems (ISSN 1094-7167) is To prevent these digital beings from form behavior showed its face in Tierra, published bimonthly by the IEEE Computer Society. IEEE gaining access to the actual hardware of including competitive, exploitative, and Headquarters, Three Park Ave., 17th Floor, New York, NY 10016- 5997; IEEE Computer Society Publications Office, 10662 Los the they lived in like computer protective behaviors. Vaqueros Circle, PO Box 3014, Los Alamitos, CA 90720-1314, viruses, Ray made the entire Tierra pro- phone +1 714 821 8380; IEEE Computer Society Headquarters, 1730 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036-1903. Subscription gram run on a virtual computer created in Life among the Avidians rates: IEEE Computer Society members get the lowest rates and the . Tierra’s Inspired by Ray’s work, Adami and choice of media option – $32/26/42 US print/electronic/combination. Go to http://computer.org/subscribe to order and for more information basically performed four functions: , a microbiologist at Michi- on other subscription prices. Nonmember rate: available on request. gan State University, began their own Alife Back issues: $10 for members and $20 for nonmembers. This • allocation of memory to each organism, magazine is available on microfiche. experiments a few years later. Lenski had letting the organism have the exclusive privi- been conducting (and continues to conduct) Copyright and reprint permissions: Abstracting is permitted lege of modifying its own structure, to pre- with credit to the source. Libraries are permitted to photocopy wet lab experiments on evolution in his lab beyond the limits of US copyright law for the private use of patrons serve its unique identity; 1) those post-1977 articles that carry a code at the bottom of the • allocation of CPU time to each organism so with E. coli , where a single experi- first page, provided the per-copy fee indicated in the code is paid ment can span up to 24,000 generations— through the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, it could act; Danvers, MA 01923; and 2) pre-1978 articles without fee. For other • placement of each organism in a queue usually, a new one about every 3.5 hours.9 copying, reprint, or republication permissions, write to the Copyright and—depending on life cycle, natural selec- and Permissions Department, IEEE Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, After having read Adami’s book, Lenski Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331. Copyright © 2000 The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS How to Reach Us

Writers For detailed information on submitting articles, write for our Editorial Guidelines (isystems@ computer.org), or access computer.org/ intelligent/edguide.htm.

Letters to the Editor Send letters to Dennis Taylor Associate Editor IEEE Intelligent Systems 10662 Los Vaqueros Circle Los Alamitos, CA 90720 [email protected] Please provide an e-mail address or daytime phone number with your letter.

Figure 4. Example of an lattice during a computer run at a reasonably low mutation rate. A different color is On the Web assigned each genotype that has more than three organisms of that type. Genotypes that don’t reach this threshold are colored dark blue. The Avida world shown is toroidal, so each edge wrap is connected to the opposite edge of the Access computer.org/intelligent for information figure. This picture was taken at update 3,100 of an 100 × 100 grid. about IEEE Intelligent Systems. Subscription Change of Address soon contacted him to learn more about virtual results and actual ones on the same Send change-of-address requests for magazine Alife, and Avida—a new software program footing, to test how accurately Alife can subscriptions to [email protected]. Be developed by Titus Brown and Charles replicate the workings of natural evolution. sure to specify Intelligent Systems. Ofria, Adami’s students—emerged. However, Princeton evolutionary biolo- Avida would not only enable digital life gist Rob Knight feels this comparison Membership Change of Address forms to evolve, but would subject them to requires more subtle treatment: “A major Send change-of-address requests for the mem- experiments in evolution, such as inserting distinction in the Alife community is be- bership directory to directory.updates@ a particular type of mutation and seeing tween weak and strong Alife. Weak Alife, what resulted in the ensuing generations. which claims that of evolving computer.org. The program typically ran for about 5,000 systems may help us understand biological Missing or Damaged Copies to 20,000 generations, taking only two to life, is relatively uncontroversial, especially eight hours to complete. By comparison, when the simulations relate closely to nat- If you are missing an issue or you received similar experiments performed in vivo or ural systems, such as Nilsson and Pelger’s a damaged copy, contact membership@ in vitro in a lab could take days. study of the evolution of eye morphology.10 computer.org. Together, Adami and Lenski created a These [simulations] clearly provide valuable virtual environment where one initial bug insight. However, experimental biologists Reprints of Articles was programmed to reproduce itself and tend to distrust computer experiments, per- For price information or to order reprints, send e- mutate every 1,000 or so “births.” The bug haps unfairly, on the grounds that models mail to [email protected] or fax +1 714 could also perform simple mathematical often merely reflect biases programmed in at 821 4010. functions that the environment rewarded, by the start. Strong Alife, which claims that allowing those bugs to replicate at a faster replicating programs inside computers really Reprint Permission rate. This helped push out the less compe- are alive, is far more controversial. This is To obtain permission to reprint an article, contact tent bugs, forcing them to eventually die partly because the examples of biological William Hagen, IEEE Copyrights and Trademarks off—emulating natural selection. life we are all familiar with are orders of Manager, at [email protected]. “Today,” says Adami, “we try to do exper- magnitude more complex and partly because iments with both our virtual Avidians and E. the claimed similarities with biological evo- coli in vitro to be able to compare the re- lution tend to be rather abstract.” sults.” The researchers have found that the IEEE evolutionary principles seen in the comput- Alife vs. life itself erized environment accurately mirror those The question of the nature and origin of found in nature, and that the “survivors” in life has preoccupied human thought since their system appeared stronger and less af- the dawn of time. It has been answered in fected by random mutations than less fit in- turn by priests, philosophers, shamans, dividuals. The experiment purports to put seers, mystics, scientists, and charlatans. & their applications

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2000 Data mining

ment infrastructure of a fictional e-commerce company, includ- Data mining ing a Web server, an industry-strength system, Web- database connectivity, and applications such as data mining.” e-business Students will use the lab to construct and use large as well as to design and conduct Web-based surveys and primary Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Manage- market research for business clients. They will also develop mod- ment (www.johnson.cornell.edu) has received a $200,000 els to attract more visitors to Web sites, keep them there longer, grant from Intel to create an e-business database management improve look-to-buy ratios, retain profitable customers, learn laboratory. As part of a new program in e-business studies, about customers’ preferences, and personalize marketing offers. students will use the lab to do their own data mining and inter- “Cornell will be one of the first schools to have a laboratory active analysis of customers’ behavior generated by Web- specifically designed to introduce students to this technology based businesses. When the Johnson School’s immersion and to allow faculty to conduct research with contemporary course on e-commerce debuts in January 2001, the lab will be resources,” says Richard Conway, leader of the e-business fully equipped with workstations, servers, networking equip- immersion faculty team and the Emerson Electric Professor ment, and software. emeritus at the Johnson School. “The lab will allow us to offer a hands-on approach to learn- Cornell is one of five universities worldwide selected to receive ing about e-business,” says Johannes Gehrke, assistant profes- Intel grants supporting e-business studies this year. The others are sor of computer science in Cornell’s Faculty of Computing and Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and the University of Michigan in the Information Sciences group. “It will support a data manage- United States and Tsinghua University in China.

All the religions and all the mythologies of looked at as a simulacrum for real biology, life is somewhat specious. It is frequently the world have given it a central place in many mainstream biologists feel it does not difficult to draw meaningful scientific dis- their belief systems, and only lately in the offer a legitimate vehicle for the study of tinctions between organisms, viruses, and history of mankind has it become the pur- living organisms or how they evolved. growing crystals. Thus, I have no problem view of science—creationism notwith- When asked for his views on Alife, chemist with those who say that life inside a com- standing. Given this import, it’s not surpris- Stanley Miller, who in 1952 conducted the puter is ‘real’ life; the word is as ambiguous ing that the idea of computers simulating first experiment that simulated the primor- inside a computer as outside. From this life should elicit debate, controversy, and dial soup of the primitive earth and pro- standpoint, while creatures (or ‘replicators’) even incredulity. duced amino acids, retorted, “Running spawned by Alife couldn’t adapt to a biologi- On one hand, Alife represents a dynamic, equations through a computer does not con- cal environment (imagine cellular automata new multidisciplinary field that continues to stitute an experiment!”11 However, judging in a rain forest), they can compete and adapt thrive and attract new followers. It has pro- the merits of Alife solely on the basis of in a virtual one. So artificial life shouldn’t be duced some remarkable research, and its how well its answers stack up against those judged on the basis of whether or not it’s as scientists are making inroads in a plethora derived from traditional biology could dis- valid as biological life, but should be re- of disciplines, such as algorithm develop- tort and even diminish its accomplishments. garded as a completely separate entity, which ment, software, hardware, robotics, popula- Andy Ellington, a biochemist and engi- a priori doesn’t need to have the same under- tion biology, economics, and complex sys- neer who studies evolution at the University lying rules as biological replicators. What we tems analysis. of Texas at Austin believes the problem need is a paradigm shift in the way we think However, some scientists view Alife with might lie with confusion over how we define about the concept of life.” wariness, skepticism, and dismissal. When life. Says Ellington, “The whole notion of Rob Knight agrees: “To be convincing, future Alife research needs to clearly define life and its characteristics, and show that Alife experiments can both recapture and For further reading extend the results of more traditional meth- ods of inference about evolution.” Alife Bibliography: www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ezequiel/alife-page/alife.html However it’s viewed, Alife has not only The Alife Database: http://arieldolan.com/aldb/default.asp spawned some fascinating varieties of digi- Alife VII Conference: http://alife7.alife.org tal life, but also an exciting new field of Artificial Life (MIT Press): http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=10645462 research. Moreover, Alife has engendered a Artificial Life Online 2.0: http://alife.org Boids Page: www.red3d.com/cwr/boids rich and provocative body of thought— Digital Life Laboratory: http://dllab.caltech.edu whether you’re for or against it—with the The Ellington Lab at the University of Texas at Austin: http://ellingtonlab.org potential for generating an endless number The Golem Project: http://golem03.cs-i.brandeis.edu/index.html of new ideas. Technosphere: www.technosphere.org.uk Tierra home page: www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra References Virtual Alife : www.cs.brandeis.edu/~zippy/alife-library.html 1. C.G. Langton, Artificial Life: An Overview, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. ix.

6 IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS 2. C.G. Langton, Artificial Life: An Over- Robotics “Some rehabilitation centers around view, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., the world are starting programs that will 1995, p. 113. NASA robotics allow therapists to train individuals af- 3. K. Sims, “Evolving 3D Morphology and fected with spinal injuries, stroke, and Behavior by Competition,” Proc. Artificial could help patients perhaps other neuromotor disorders to Life IV, R. Brooks and P. Maes, eds., MIT improve their mobility and stepping ca- Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, pp. walk 28Ð39. pacity,” says Reggie Edgerton, professor NASA engineers and neurophysiologists in the departments of physiological sci- 4. C. Adami, Introduction to Artificial Life, at the University of California, Los Angeles, ence and neurobiology at UCLA. “This Springer-Verlag, New York, 1998, p. 13. are creating a robot-like device that could robotic device could help therapists in 5. H. Lipson and J. Polluck, “Automatic help rehabilitate people with spinal cord those rehabilitation efforts.” Design and Manufacture of Robotic injuries. JPL robotic engineers have worked Lifeforms,” Nature, Vol. 406, No. 6799, “We are developing a prototype ro- alongside therapists to develop the de- 2000, pp. 974Ð978. botic stepper device that, when com- vice, which has highly sensitive sensors 6. C. Adami, Introduction to Artificial Life, plete, will be used as part of rehabilita- that collect up to 24 different data read- Springer-Verlag, New York, 1998, p. 15. tion that can potentially help some peo- ings of the patient’s activity. The device, 7. G. Theraulaz and W. Bonabeau, ple now wheelchair-bound take their connected to a computer, displays the “Coordination in Distributed Building,” first steps,” says Jim Weiss, program information on the screen for the thera- Science, Vol. 269, No. 687, 1995, pp. manager for collaborative neural repair pist to monitor. 686Ð688. at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. According to Weiss, this same device 8. J.L. Casti, Would-be Worlds: How “This system can do the work of four could also someday be useful to astronauts Simulation Is Changing the Frontiers of therapists and help monitor a patient’s and help them walk safely after prolonged Science, John Wiley & Sons, New York, progress in a controlled manner.” periods in space, such as extended mis- 1997, p. 165. The device will look like a treadmill sions on the International Space Station. 9. T. Appenzeller, “Test Tube Evolution with robotic arms and will be fitted with a The robotic stepper device is one of sev- Catches Time in a Bottle,” Science, Vol. harness to support the patient’s weight. eral projects in the Neural Repair Program 284, No. 5423, 1999, pp. 2108Ð2110. The arms resemble knee braces that attach at the UCLA Brain Research Institute 10. D.E. Nilsson and S. Pelger, “A Pessimistic to the patient’s leg, guiding the legs prop- (www.medsch.ucla.edu/som/bri) and JPL Estimate of The Time Required for an Eye erly on the moving treadmill. Although the (www.jpl.nasa.gov). JPL and UCLA are to Evolve,” Proc. Royal Society London B, robotic stepper is still in development and actively pursuing efforts to commercialize London, 1994, pp. 53Ð58. is not yet ready for use in rehabilitation, the robotic system. JPL technically sup- 11. S. Levy, Artificial Life, Vintage Books, the device could be part of clinical trials at ported UCLA in filing a patent application New York, 1992, p. 139. UCLA in about three years. in August.