Virtual Organisms

I've read 'Virtual Organisms' by Mark Ward.

There is next to nothing in the book that's relevant to this project, except for a couple of passing references to chess playing computers. I'll quickly summarise the book, so I can refer back to this if I need to, for some reason. I'm aware this post is an incoherent mess, but it's really just for my reference.

Chapter 1) Biological stuff, the theories about how life started on Earth. DNA, RNA, genes, those sort of things.
Chapter 2) Von Neumann's automata ideas, cellular automaton, Conway's Game of Life, CA categorisation (classes I - IV), Sugarscape, quantum cellular automata to process information and make smaller CPUs.
Chapter 3) Turing machine, Godel's incompleteness theorem/Hilbert's problem, 'On Computable Numbers', theorem proving programs, Shakey, William Gray Walter's tortoises - exploring what complexity of behaviour can be achieved with the smallest number of elements, the previous belief that thinking involves mainpulating symbols that represent the world. Tilden's BEAM robots.
Chapter 4) Genetic algorithms (Tierra, Avida) - evolution. Ants/agents in BT's CSS program.
Chapter 5) FGPA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), Adrian Thompson explores how evolution via GAs can create useful circuits on these. Working tone discriminator in 32 cells, 100 was thought to be the minimum. Thompson doesn't know how it works.
6) Humans playing God, better be careful.



And a quote from Kasparov on Deep Blue: "I could feel — I could smell — a new kind of intelligence across the table."


It was quite an interesting book.