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[Turing Dreams] Sex with robots II: robot reproduction | Turing Dreams: Stanislaw Lem in his novel “The Invincible” (1964) recounted the story of a spaceship landing on a distant planet to find a mechanical life form, the product of millions of years of mechanical evolution. Interestingly, Lem’s lifeform exhibited swarm intelligence: relatively “dumb” parts united into a hyper-organism with hyper-intelligence.

[Evolution, Mind and Meaning] Scientific Determinism vs. Spiritual Predestination | Evolution ...: During Chapter Seven, Dennet brings to light Conway’s game of life.  In the early 1940’s, the mathematician John von Neumann posed the following question: How intricate must something be to self-replicate? He hoped to design a mathematical program that would theoretically make a copy of itself on its own, an ability that some living organisms had already developed.  Von Neumann wanted to create something that was more thoughtful and could genuinely mimic physical life.  The term cellular autonomy was eventually coined to describe  Von Neumann’s model.  According to Math World, an online mathematical database, “a cellular automaton is a collection of ”˜colored’ cells on a grid of specified shape that evolves through a number of discrete time steps according to a set of rules based on the states of neighboring cells.”

[followbookmarks | Published News] Service Virtualization using a non-von Neumann Parallel ...: According to Backus: "Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand.

[Space] Von Neumann Machines: Problems and Solutions with Interstellar ...: In the 1960s the Hungarian-American mathematician John Von Neumann envisaged a self-replicating machine or robot that has come to be known as a Von Neumann Machine (VNM). These machines would be sent to, say, the nearest 10 planetary systems and would carry onboard human DNA code.

[Matt mcirvin's Steam-Operated World of Yesteryear] Not a Life replicator, but still interesting: It'd be mighty impressive if someone were to build a replicator in Conway Life, which was just studied because it exhibited a lot of interesting behavior from very simple rules (much simpler than von Neumann's), and in that sense is more of a "natural" little universe. While it might not provide much in the way of extra insight about natural or artificial life, it would at the very least be interesting to watch, and probably provide a lot of technical know-how about how to build things in the Life world.

[Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation] Review of Johnston, John: Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics ...: With this new extension of the machinic phylum, the opposition between machines and organisms has become "a nexus from which new conceptual possibilities and technologies are rapidly emerging". The following chapter (Digital Evolution and the Emergence of Complexity) deals with those fascinating virtual universes populated with evolving creatures, like Tierra, Avida or Amoeba which were so impressive that Thomas Ray, the creator of Tierra, wrote a provocative paper entitled "How I Created Life in a Virtual Universe".

[Tor.com Frontpage Partial - Blog and Story Content] Going through the Spin Cycle: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson | Tor ...: With the recent publication of Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, I decided to re-read the first two books in the trilogy, Spin and Axis, to warm up for the long-awaited new novel and to refresh my memory. Like every truly excellent novel, it turns out that Spin is better and more rewarding on the second read-through.

[New Elgg site: foreverhcg39's blog] New Elgg site: foreverhcg39's blog: Conway's Game of Life ...: Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. The Game of Life emerged as Conway's successful attempt to drastically simplify von Neumann's ideas.

[Modern Mechanix] Fast and Smart – Designers race to build the supercomputers of the ...: Apparently deep in a dirt tunnel beneath his Wisconsin home, according to John Rollwagen, the chairman of Cray Research. As Rollwagen tells it, Seymour Cray, the company’s elusive founder, has been dividing his time between building the next generation of supercomputers and digging an underground tunnel that starts below his Chippewa Falls house and heads toward the nearby woods.

[Steve Brown Etc.] Steve Brown Etc. » Blog Archive » The Blueprint for an Artificial Cell: The researchers noted that, in addition to these four parts, an artificial cell must include components that aren't part of the von Neumann automaton. An artificial cell requires metabolic processes that involve the uptake of materials and energy from the environment and the expulsion of unwanted by-products.

[The Book of thoth - New pages [en]] Artificial life: One of the earliest thinkers of the modern age to postulate the potentials of artificial life, separate from artificial intelligence, was math and computer prodigy John Von Neumann. At the Hixon Symposium, hosted by Linus Pauling in Pasadena, California in the late 1940s, Von Neumann delivered a lecture titled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata." He defined an "automaton" as any machine whose behavior proceeded logically from step to step by combining information from the environment and its own programming, and said that natural organisms would in the end be found to follow similar simple rules.

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