| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"AbhiEJeet" |
| Date: |
18 Feb 2006 02:44:48 PM |
| Object: |
Does one needs to be created? |
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
.
|
|
| User: "Pip" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
20 Feb 2006 10:45:14 AM |
|
|
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140295488.197120.197410@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
That is so perfectly damn obvious as to be ridiculous
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Paul Campbell" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 10:21:42 PM |
|
|
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140295488.197120.197410@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
You're probably really going to hate this: God has existed by definition
always. In essence "before the beginning of time" which of course if a
concept Cantor probably would have loved to ponder. At some point therefore,
God existed alone in existence. Therefore, 1 thing, namely God, existed. So
1 has always been, and therefore always will be.
Now for the part you really going to hate: 1 is a symbol used to represent
an element in a set. If only one thing, God, exists in existence, does set
theory have any real meaning? An empty set doesn't even include zero, it is
simply the null set (it has no members). Now it is unknowable for what
amount of time (as we understand it) that God existed alone in existence
(which must have been a pretty tedious time even for an omniscient being)
but the moment God created ANYTHING, set theory came into existence . . .
theoretically. As to whether God perceives things in terms of quantity the
way humans do is also unknowable. Therefore, 1 has always been, and two came
into existence with mankind as a way of coping and dealing with the
existence around him.
Paul Campbell
http://www.appliedprimaryresearch.com
.
|
|
|
| User: "stoney" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 12:38:42 PM |
|
|
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:21:42 GMT, "Paul Campbell"
<primaryresearch@ix.netcom.com> wrote in alt.atheism
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140295488.197120.197410@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
You're probably really going to hate this: God has existed by definition
always.
Only by definition always, but it took some time before man came up with
the meaningless con game concept.
[]
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a cornucopia of splinters.
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Christopher A. Lee" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 08:00:11 AM |
|
|
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:21:42 GMT, "Paul Campbell"
<primaryresearch@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140295488.197120.197410@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
You're probably really going to hate this: God has existed by definition
always. In essence "before the beginning of time" which of course if a
concept Cantor probably would have loved to ponder. At some point therefore,
God existed alone in existence. Therefore, 1 thing, namely God, existed. So
1 has always been, and therefore always will be.
No. Things cannot be defined into existence. There has to be something
to point to it.
Now for the part you really going to hate: 1 is a symbol used to represent
an element in a set. If only one thing, God, exists in existence, does set
theory have any real meaning? An empty set doesn't even include zero, it is
simply the null set (it has no members). Now it is unknowable for what
amount of time (as we understand it) that God existed alone in existence
(which must have been a pretty tedious time even for an omniscient being)
but the moment God created ANYTHING, set theory came into existence . . .
theoretically. As to whether God perceives things in terms of quantity the
way humans do is also unknowable. Therefore, 1 has always been, and two came
into existence with mankind as a way of coping and dealing with the
existence around him.
Paul Campbell
http://www.appliedprimaryresearch.com
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "xeno" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 11:17:05 PM |
|
|
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Paul Campbell wrote:
God has existed by definition always.
Nothing circumstanial is self-evident.
.
|
|
|
| User: "Paul Campbell" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 09:47:11 AM |
|
|
"xeno" <xeno@transbay.net> wrote in message
news:20060218211451.I73790@synergy.transbay.net...
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Paul Campbell wrote:
God has existed by definition always.
Nothing circumstanial is self-evident.
I suppose that means "axiomatic" will have to be added to the list of words
I'm not allowed to use. The discussion had to start from some theoretical
point, else we had no frame of reference.
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Brian Fletcher" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 04:30:01 PM |
|
|
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140295488.197120.197410@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
One always was, is and will be. The mental creation is the question, which
at its core, is "who am I".
"One " cannot solve eternity, with relative approaches, the only capacity
the mind has.
BOfL
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Woden" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 03:02:47 PM |
|
|
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in news:1140295488.197120.197410
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
Easy, the same people created the figure "1" as created gods.
--
Woden
"religion is a socio-political system for controlling people's thoughts,
lives and actions based on ancient myths and superstitions, perpetrated
through generations of subtle yet pervasive brainwashing."
.
|
|
|
| User: "Jeremy" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
22 Feb 2006 10:44:54 AM |
|
|
On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 16:02:47 -0500, Woden <woden@charter.net> wrote:
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in news:1140295488.197120.197410
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
Figure 1 comes with that planet b/c that's how we make sense of the world.
If we are not here and there is only one planet which God created, then
all that exists is God and the planet. The Figure 1 automatically comes
with the planet only because humansK created a numbering system.
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
.
|
|
|
| User: "Immortalist" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
22 Feb 2006 11:04:02 AM |
|
|
"Jeremy" <everythingafter@alltel.net> wrote in message
news:op.s5dvg4x5v30xgf@autobots-6jut35...
On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 16:02:47 -0500, Woden <woden@charter.net> wrote:
"AbhiEJeet" <AbhiEJeet@gmail.com> wrote in news:1140295488.197120.197410
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
Figure 1 comes with that planet b/c that's how we make sense of the world.
If we are not here and there is only one planet which God created, then
all that exists is God and the planet. The Figure 1 automatically comes
with the planet only because humansK created a numbering system.
--
THis doesn't eliminate the possibility that the possibility for a number
system existed before humans discovered it. For that matter the human must
have been possible before the human was discovered.
----------------
http://www.kk.org/books/index.php
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201483408/
Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM
- Borge's Library of All Possible Books, Peaks of Grammar, The Method Has
Found Us
My path to the fiction section on the third floor of the university library
meandered through hundreds of thousands of books sleeping on shelves. Have
these books ever been read? Way in the back of the library, where the dark
fluorescent lights must be turned on by the browser, I searched the
international literature section for the work of the Argentinean author
Jorge Luis Borges.
I found three shelves packed with books Borges wrote or that were written
about him. Borges's stories are famously surreal. They are so absolutely
fake that they appear real; they are literate hyperreality. Some of the
books were in Spanish, some were biographies, some were full of poems, some
were anthologies of his minor essays, some were duplicate copies of other
books on the shelf, some were commentaries upon the commentaries on his
essays.
I ran my hand over the volumes, thick, thin, slim, oversize, old, and newly
bound. On a whim I slid out a worn chestnut-covered book. I opened it. It
was an anthology of interviews Borges did in his eighties. The interviews
were conducted in English, which Borges wielded more gracefully than most
native speakers. I was stunned to find that the last 24 pages contained an
interview with Borges, based on his writings in Labyrinths, which properly
could only exist in my book, this book, Out of Control.
The interview began with my question: "I read in one of your essays about a
labyrinthine maze of books. This library contained all possible books. It
was clear that this library was born as a literary metaphor, but such a
library now appears in scientific thought. Can you describe the origin of
this hall of books to me?"
BORGES: The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an
indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air
shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. There are five shelves for
each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of
uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of
forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.
ME: What do the books say?
BORGES: For every sensible line of straightforward statement in the books
there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherence.
Nonsense is normal in the Library. The reasonable (and even humble and pure
coherence) is an almost miraculous exception.
ME: You mean all the books are full of random letters?
BORGES: Nearly. One book which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit 1594
was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to
the last. Another (very much consulted, by the way) is a mere labyrinth of
letters, but the next-to-the last page says Oh time thy pyramids.
ME: But there must be some books in the Library which make sense!
BORGES: A few. Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came
upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of
homogeneous lines. The content was deciphered: some notions of combinative
analysis, illustrated with examples of variation with unlimited repetition.
ME: That's it? Two pages of rational sense discovered in five hundred years
of searching? What did the two pages say?
BORGES: The text of the two pages made it possible for a librarian to
discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all
the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same
elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the
alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast
Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible
premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register
all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a
number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite).
ME: So, in other words, any book you could possibly write, in any language,
could be found (theoretically) in the library. It contains all past and
future books!
BORGES: Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the
archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library,
thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the
fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of the Basilides, the
commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel,
the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all
languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
ME: One would have to guess, then, that the Library holds immaculate
books-books of the most unimaginably beautiful writing and penetrating
insight-books better than the best literature that anyone has written so
far.
BORGES: It suffices that a book be possible for it to exist in the Library.
On some shelf in some hexagon there must exist a book which is the formula
and perfect compendium of all the rest. I pray to the unknown gods that a
man-just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!-may have examined
and read it.
Borges then went on at great length about a blasphemous sect of librarians
who believed it was crucial to eliminate useless books: "They invaded the
hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a
volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves."
He caught the curiosity in my eyes and said, "Those who deplored the
'treasures' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the
Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal.
The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is
total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works
which differ only in a letter or comma."
ME: But how would one discern the difference between the real and the
almost? Such proximity means that this book I hold in my hands not only
exists in the Library, but so does a similar one, differing only by an
alternative word in a previous sentence. Perhaps the related book reads:
"every copy is not unique, irreplaceable." How would you know if you ever
found the book you were looking for?
There was no reply. When I looked up I noticed I was surrounded by dusty
shelves in an eerily lit hexagonal room. By some fantastical logic, I was
standing in Borges's Library. Here were the twenty shelves, and the receding
layers upon layers of upper and lower floors visible between the low
railing, and the labyrinth of corridors lined with books.
Borges's Library was as marvelous as it was a temptation. For two years I
had been working on the book you now hold. At that time I was one year past
my deadline. I couldn't afford to finish it, and I couldn't afford to not
finish it. A grand resolution to my dilemma lay somewhere in this Library of
all possible books. I would search Borges's Library until I found on some
shelf the best of all possible books I could write, one entitled Out of
Control. This would be a book already written, edited, and proofed. It would
spare me another year of tortuous work, work I was not sure I was even up
to. It certainly seemed worth a try looking for it.
So I set off down the endless corridors of book-filled hexagons.
After passing through the fifth hexagon, I paused and on a whim I reached
out and dislodged a stiff green book from a cramped upper shelf. Inside it
was utter chaos.
So was the one next to it, and the next after that. I fled this hexagon and
walked quickly through identical corridors of hexagons for about a half
mile, until I stopped again and plucked a book from a nearby shelf without
deliberation. The book was rotten with the same gibberish. I checked the
entire row and found the same rot. I inspected several other spots in the
hexagon and could not distinguish any improvement among them. For several
more hours I wandered changing directions, checking hundreds of books, some
on lower shelves near my feet and some perched almost at the ceiling, but
all contained the same undistinguished garbage. There appeared to be
billions of books of nonsense. A book entirely full of the letters MCV, as
Borges's father found, would have been quite exhilarating.
Yet the temptation lingered. I figure I could spend days, or even weeks,
searching for the completed Out of Control book by Kevin Kelly, at a
profitable gamble. I might even find a better Out of Control book by Kevin
Kelly than I could write myself, for which I would be thankful to spend a
year hunting.
I stopped to rest upon the small landing on one of the spiral staircases
that wound between floors. I reflected on the design of the Library. From
where I sat I could see nine stores up the air shaft and nine below, and
about a mile in the six directions of the honeycombed floors. If this
Library contained all possible books, my reasoning went, then any volumes
that fit the rules of grammar (let alone were interesting) would be so tiny
a fraction of the total books, that my coming upon one by random search
would be miraculous. Five hundred years sounded about right as the time
needed to find two sensible pages-any two sensible pages. To find a readable
book would take several millenniums, with luck.
I decided to take a different tack.
There were a constant number of books per shelf. There were a constant
number of shelves per hexagon. All the hexagons were uniform, lit by a
grapefruit-size bulb of light, interspersed by hallways with two closet
doors and a mirror in each. The Library was ordered.
If the Library was ordered that meant (most likely) the books it contained
were also ordered. If the volumes were arranged so that books that differed
only slightly were placed near each other, and books that differed greatly
were separated widely, then this organization would yield a way for me to
fairly quickly find a readable book somewhere in this Library of all
possible books. If this vastness of the Library was so ordered, there was
even a chance I could put my hands on a completed Out of Control, a book
embossed with my name on the title page, but which I did not have to write.
I commenced my shortcut to achievement by selecting a book from the nearest
stack. I spent ten minutes studying its nonsense. I strode a hundred yards
away to the seventh nearest hexagon and picked another book. I did the same
in turn for each of the six radiating directions. I scanned the six new
texts and then I selected the one that held the most "sense" compared to
first. In one I found a sensible three word sequence: "or bog and." Then I
repeated the search routine using this "bog" volume as the base, comparing
texts in the six directions around it. After several iterations I uncovered
a book whose noisy pages contained two phraselike sequences. I was getting
warmer. After many iterations of this ritual I found a book with four
English phrases hidden among the detritus of garbled letters.
I quickly learned to search very wide-about 200 hexagons in each
direction-spreading out from the last "best" book in order to explore the
library faster. I kept progressing in this fashion until I found books with
many English phrases, although the clauses were scattered among the pages.
My hours turned to days. The topological pattern of "good" books formed a
image in my mind. Every complete grammatical book in the Library sat in a
disguised epicenter. At the center was the book; immediately surrounding it
were shelves of close facsimiles of the book; each facsimile contained a
mere alteration in punctuation-an inserted comma, a deleted period. Ringing
these books were shelves of lesser counterfeits that altered a word or two.
Surrounding this second ring was a further broad ring of books that differed
by whole sentences, most of them degraded illogical statements.
I imagined the rings of grammar as a map of contour lines circling round a
mountain. The map represented a geography of coherence. A single celestial,
readable book resided on a summit's peak; below it lay ever greater masses
of baser books. The lower the books, the more base they were, and the
greater was the circumference of their bulk. The entire mountain of "almost"
books stood in an enormous plain of undifferentiated nonsense.
To find a book then was a matter of scaling the summit of order. As long as
I made sure that I was always climbing uphill-always marching toward books
that contained more sense-I would inevitably arrive at the apex of a
readable book. As long as I moved through the Library across the contour of
increasingly better grammar, then I would inevitably arrive at the hexagon
harboring a wholly grammatical book-the peak.
After several days of using what I began to call the Method, I found a book.
Such a book could not have been found by aimless rambling of the kind that
produced the two pages Borges's father found. Only the Method could have
guided me to this center of coherence. I justified my investment of time by
reminding myself that I found more with the Method than generations of
librarians had uncovered by their unorganized rambles.
As forecasted by the Method, the book I found (entitled Hadal) was
surrounded by broad concentric rings of similar pseudobooks. But the text
itself, although grammatically correct, was disappointingly bland, flat,
characterless. The most interesting parts read like very bad poetry. There
was one line alone that shone with remarkable intelligence and has stuck
with me: "The present is hidden from us."
However, I never did find a copy Out of Control. Nor did I find a book that
could steal an evening from me. I see now that would have taken years, even
with the Method. Instead, I exited from Borges's Library into the university
library and then returned home to conclude Out of Control by writing it
myself.
The Method tickled my curiosity and distracted me from my writing. Was it
widely known among travelers and librarians? I was prepared for the
probability that others must have uncovered it in the past. Returning to the
university library (finite and catalogued), I searched for a book with an
answer. I bounced from index to footnote, from footnote to book, landing far
from where I began. What I found amazed me. The truth seemed farfetched:
Scientists believe the Method has saturated our world since time immemorial.
It was not invented by man; by God perhaps. The Method is a variety of what
we now call evolution.
If we can accept this analysis, then the Method is how we have all been
found.
More amazing yet: I had taken Borges's Library to be the private dream (a
virtual reality) of an imaginative author, yet I read with growing
fascination that his Library was real. I believe the sly Borges had known
this all along; he had cast his account as fiction, for who would have
believed him? (Others say his fiction was a way to jealously guard his
access to this most awesome space.)
Two decades ago nonlibrarians discovered Borges's Library in silicon
circuits of human manufacture. The poetic can imagine the countless rows of
hexagons and hallways stacked up in the Library corresponding to the
incomprehensible microlabyrinth of crystalline wires and gates stamped into
a silicon computer chip. A computer chip, blessed by the proper incantation
of software, creates Borges's Library on command. The initiated chip employs
its companion screen to display the text of any book in Borges's Library;
first a text from block 1594, the next from the little visited section 2CY.
Pages from the books appear on the screen one after another without delay.
To search Borges's Library of all possible books, past, present, and future,
one needs only to sit down (the modern solution) and click the mouse.
Neither the model, the speed, the soundness of design, or the geographical
residence of the computer makes any difference while generating a portal to
Borges's Library. This Borges himself did not know, although he would have
appreciated it: that whatever artificial means are used to get there, all
travelers arrive at exactly the same Library. (Which is to say all libraries
of possible books are identical; there are no counterfeit Libraries of
Borges; all copies of the Library are original.) The consequence of this
universality is that any computer can create a Borgian Library of all
possible books.
- Climbing Peaks by Folding, Screen that Breeds/Domesticates/Finds All
Possible Pictures
The most powerful computer made in 1993, the Connection Machine 5 (CM5), can
effortlessly generate Borges's Library of books. But the CM5 can also
generate equally vast and mysterious Borgian Libraries of complex things
other than books.
Karl Sims, who works for Thinking Machines, the maker of the CM5, has made a
Borgian Library of art and pictures. Sims first wrote special software for
the Connection Machine and then constructed a universe (which others call a
Library) of all possible pictures. The same machinery that can generate a
possible book can generate a possible picture. In the former case the output
are letters printed in linear sequence; in the latter, a rectangle of pixels
displayed on a screen. Sims hunts for patterns of pixels instead of patterns
of letters.
I visit Sims in his dark office cubicle at Thinking Machines's Cambridge,
Massachusetts, offices. Two extra-large, bright monitors sit on Sims's desk.
His largest monitor is divided into a matrix of 20 small projected
rectangles, 4 down and 5 across. Each rectangle is a window that at the
moment shows a realistically marbled doughnut. Each of the 20 pictures is
slightly varied in patterns.
Sims uses his mouse to click on the lower right corner rectangle. In a blink
all 20 rectangles are refreshed with newly marbled doughnuts, each new image
a slight variation of the formerly selected corner pattern. By clicking on a
sequence of images, Sims can walk through a Borgian Library of visual
patterns using the Method. Instead of bodily running ahead seven yards (in
many directions) to reach a stored pattern, Sims's software calculates what
the pattern would logically be seven yards away (since it turns out the
Borgian Library is extremely ordered). He then paints the newfound pattern
on the screen. The Connection Machine does this in milliseconds,
simultaneously figuring the new patterns in 20 different directions away
from the last selection.
There is no limit to what picture could possibly appear from the Library. In
true Borgian fashion, this total universe contains all shades of rose, all
stripes; it contains the Mona Lisa, and all Mona Lisa parodies; every swirl,
the blueprints of the Pentagon, all of Van Gogh's sketches, every frame from
Gone With the Wind, all speckled scallop shells. These are desires, though;
on whimsical rambles through this Library, Sims harvests chiefly windows
filled with amorphous blotches, streaks, and psychedelic swirls of color.
The Method-as evolution-can be conceived of not as traveling but as
breeding. Sims describes the twenty new images as twenty children of an
original parent. The twenty pictures vary just as offspring do. Then he
selects the "best" offspring, which in turn immediately sires twenty new
variations. He'll pick the best of that lot, and that best will sire twenty
more variations. He can begin with a simple sphere and by cumulative
selection end with a cathedral.
Watching the forms appear, multiply in variation, get selected, ramify in
form, winnow again, and begin to drift over generations to ever more
complicated shapes, neither mind nor gut can escape the impression that Sims
is really breeding images. Richer, wilder, more esthetically fit images
unfold over generations. Sims and fellow computationalists call it
artificial evolution.
The mathematical logic of breeding pictures is indistinguishable from the
mathematical logic of breeding pigeons. Conceptually the two processes are
equivalent. Although we may call it artificial evolution, there is nothing
about it that is more or less artificial than breeding dachshunds. Both
methods are equally artificial (of the art) and natural (true to nature).
In Sims's universe evolution has been yanked from the living world and left
naked in mathematics. Stripped of its cloak of tissue and hair, stolen from
its womb of moist wet flesh, and then spirited into circuits, the vital
essence of evolution has moved from the world of the born to the world of
the made, from its former sole domain of carbon ring to the manufactured
silicon world of algorithmic chips.
The shock is not that evolution has been transported from carbon to silicon;
silicon and carbon are actually very similar elements. The shock of
artificial evolution is that it is fundamentally natural to computers.
Within ten cycles, Sims's artificial breeding will produce something that is
"interesting." Often as few as five hops will land Sims someplace that is
greater than mere chaotic splatters. While he clicks from picture to
picture, Sims talks, as Borges did, of "traveling through the Library," or
"exploring the space." The pictures exist "out there" even though they are
not rendered into visual form until found or selected.
The electronic version of Borges's Library of books can be considered in the
same way. The book texts exist abstractly, independent of form. Each sleeps
in its assigned spot on a virtual shelf in the virtual Library. When
selected, the cabalistic silicon chip breathes form into a book's virtual
self to awaken the text onto the screen. A conjurer travels to a place in
the space (which is ordered) and there awakens the particular book that must
rest there. Every coordinate has a book; every book a coordinate. Just as
for the traveler, one vista opens up many new possible locations for yet
more vistas; in the Library one coordinate begets many subsequent related
coordinates. An initiated librarian travels through the space in sequential
hops; the path is a chain of selections.
Thus the six texts derived from the original text are six relatives; they
share a familial form and informational seed. In the scale of the Library
their variation is on the order of siblings. Since they are relatives
derived in a following generation, they can thus be called offspring. The
single chosen "best" offspring text becomes the parent in the next round;
one of its six grand-offspring variations will become the parent in that
generation.
While I was within Borges's Library, I saw myself hunting for a readable
book over a trail that began at gibberish. But another looking in would see
me breeding a nonsense book into a viable book, just as one might
domesticate a disorganized wildflower into the elegant cup of a rose through
many generations of selection.
Karl Sims breeds gray noise into jubilant images of plant life on the CM5.
"There is no limitation to what evolution can come up with. It can surpass
the design capabilities of humans," he claims. He devised a way to rope off
the immense Library so that his wanderings would stay within the range of
all possible plant forms. As he evolved his way through this space, he
copied "seeds" of those forms he found most intriguing. Later Sims
reconstituted his harvest and rendered them into fantastical
three-dimensional plant shapes that he could animate. His domesticated
forest included a giant unrolling fern frond, spindly pine things with a
Christmas ball on top, grass with crab-claw blades, and twisty oak trees.
Eventually these bizarre, evolved plants populated a video of his creations
called Panspermia. In this animation, alien trees and strange giant grasses
sprouted from seeds, eventually carpeting a barren planet with an unearthly
jungle of rooted things. The evolved (now animated) plants produced their
own seeds which were blasted from a bulbous cannon of a plant into space and
onto the next barren world (the process of Panspermia).
- Biomorph Land, Recursive Embryology, Mutating Growing Rules Tunes /
Breeding Expands
Karl Sims is not the only explorer of the architecture of the Borgian
universe (which some call the Library), nor was he the first. As far as I
can tell, the first librarian of a synthetic Borgian world was the British
zoologist Richard Dawkins. In 1985, Dawkins invented a universe he called
"Biomorph Land." Biomorph Land is the space of possible biological shapes
constructed with short straight lines and branches. It was the first
computer-generated library of possible forms that could be searched by
breeding.
Dawkins wrote Biomorph Land as an educational program to illustrate how
designed things could be created without a designer. He wanted to
demonstrate visually that while random selection and aimless wandering would
never produce a coherent design, cumulative selection (the Method) could.
Despite a prestigious reputation in biology, Dawkins was experienced in
programming mainframe computers. Biomorph is a fairly sophisticated computer
program. It draws a stick of a certain length, and in a growthlike pattern,
adds branches to it, and branches to the branches. How the branches fork,
how many are added, and at what length they are added are all values that
can vary independently by small amounts from form to form. In Dawkins's
program these values also "mutate" at random. Every form it draws differs by
one mutation of nine possible variables.
Dawkins hoped to traverse a library of tree shapes by artificial selection
and breeding. A form was born in Biomorph Land as a line so short it was a
dot. Dawkins's program generated eight offspring of the dot, much as Sims's
later program would do. The dot's children varied in length depending on
what value the random mutation assigned. The computer projected each
offspring, plus the parent, in a nine-square display. In the now familiar
style of selective breeding Dawkins selected the most pleasing form (his
choice) and evolved a succession of ever more complex variant forms. By the
seventh generation, offspring were accelerating in filigreed detail.
That was Dawkins's hope as he began writing the code in BASIC. If he was
lucky in his programming he'd get a universe of wonderfully diverse
branching trees.
The first day he got the program running, Dawkins spent an exhilarating hour
rummaging through the nearest shelves of his Borgian Library. Progressing a
mutation at a time, he came upon unexpected arrangements of stem, stick, and
trunk. Here were odd trees nature had never claimed. And line drawings of
bushes, grass, and flowers that never were. Echoing the dual metaphor of
evolution and libraries, Dawkins wrote in The Blind Watchmaker, "When you
first evolve a new creature by artificial selection in the computer model,
it feels like a creative process. So it is, indeed. But what you are really
doing is finding the creature, for it is, in a mathematical sense, already
sitting in its own place in the genetic space of Biomorph Land."
As the hours passed, he noticed he was entering a space in the Library where
the branching structures of his trees began to cross back upon themselves,
filling in areas with crisscrossing lines until they congealed into a solid
mass. The recursive branches closed upon themselves forming little bodies
rather than trunks. Auxiliary branches still sprouting from these bodies
looked surprisingly like legs and wings. He had entered the part of the
Library where insects dwelled (despite the fact that he as God had not
intended there be such a country!). He discovered all sorts of weird bugs
and butterflies.
Dawkins was astonished: "When I wrote the program I never imagined it would
evolve anything but treelike shapes. I had hoped for weeping willows,
poplars, and cedars of Lebanon."
Now there were insects everywhere. Dawkins was too excited to eat that
evening. He spent more hours discovering amazingly complex creatures looking
like scorpions and water spiders and even frogs. He said later, "I was
almost feverish with excitement. I cannot convey the exaltation I felt of
exploring a land which I had supposedly made. Nothing in my biologist's
background, nothing in my 20 years of programming computers, and nothing in
my wildest dreams, prepared me for what actually emerged on the screen."
That night he couldn't sleep. He kept pressing on, dying to survey the
extent of his universe. What other surprises did this supposedly simple
world contain? When he finally fell asleep in the early morning, images of
"his" insects swarmed in his dreams.
Over the following months, Dawkins tramped the backwaters of Biomorph Land
hunting for nonplant and abstract shapes. The short list of forms he
encountered included: "fairy shrimps, Aztec temples, Gothic church windows,
and aboriginal drawings of kangaroos." Making the best use of an idle minute
here and there, Dawkins eventually used the evolutionary method to locate
many letters of the alphabet. (These letters were bred into visibility, not
drawn.) His goal was to capture the letters in his name, but he never could
find a passable D or a decent K. (On the wall of my office I have a
wonderful poster of the 26 letters and 10 numerals found shimmering on
living butterfly wings-including a marvelous D and K. But although these
letters evolved, they were not found by the Method. The photographer, Kjell
Sandved, told me he inspected more than a million wings to gather all 36
symbols.)
Dawkins was on a quest. He later wrote, "There are computer games on the
market in which the player has the illusion that he is wandering about in an
underground labyrinth, which has a definite if complex geography and in
which he encounters dragons, minotaurs or other mythic adversaries. In these
games the monsters are rather few in number. They are all designed by a
human programmer, and so is the geography of the labyrinth. In the evolution
game, whether the computer version or the real thing, the player (or
observer) obtains the same feeling of wandering metaphorically through a
labyrinth of branching passages, but the number of possible pathways is all
but infinite, and the monsters that one encounters are undesigned and
unpredictable."
Most magically the monsters in this space were seen once and then were lost.
The earliest versions of Biomorph Land did not have a function for saving
the coordinates of every biomorph. The shapes appeared on the screen, roused
from their shelf in the Library, and when the computer was turned off, they
returned to their mathematical place. The probability of encountering them
again was infinitesimal.
When Dawkins first arrived in the district of insects he desperately wanted
to keep one so he could find it again. He printed out a picture of it, and a
picture of all the 28 ancestral forms he evolved along the way to get to it,
but at that time his prototype program would not let him save the underlying
numbers enabling him to reconstruct the form. He knew that once he flicked
his computer off that night, the insect biomorphs would be gone except for
the wisp of their souls held by their portraits. Could he ever reevolve
identical forms? He killed the power. He had proof, at least, that they
existed somewhere in his Library. Knowing they were there haunted him.
Despite the fact that Dawkins had both the starting point and the sequence
of 28 "fossils" leading up to the specific insect he was trying to
recapture, the biomorphs remained elusive. Karl Sims, too, once bred a
dazzling, luminescent image of colorful loopy strings on his CM5-very
reminiscent of a painting by Jackson Pollock-before he wrote a
coordinate-saving feature; he too was never able to rediscover the image,
although he owns a slide of it to serve as a trophy.
Borgian space is vast. Deliberately relocating a point in this space is as
difficult as replaying an identical game of chess. A tiny, almost
undetectable error of choice at any turn can carry one to a destination
miles from one's aim. In Biomorph space the complexity of the forms, the
complexity of choices at each juncture, and the subtlety of their
differences, guarantees that every evolved form is probably the first and
last visit.
Perhaps in the Library of Borges there is a book called Labyrinths that
holds the following miraculous story (not contained in the book Labyrinths
found on the shelf in the university library). In this book Jorge Luis
Borges tells how his father, who was a traveler in the universe of all
possible books, once came upon a sensible book in this confusing vastness.
All four hundred and ten pages of the tome, including the table of contents,
were filled with two sentence palindromes. The first 33 palindromes were
both riddles and profound. That's all his father had time to read before an
unusual fire in the basement forced the evacuation of the librarians working
in this section. In the semi-orderly panic of exit, his father forgot the
location of this volume. Out of shame the existence of the Book of
Palindromes has never been mentioned outside the Library. For eight
generations, a somewhat secretive association of exlibrarians has been
meeting regularly to methodically retrace the old traveler's steps so that
they might rediscover this book in the Library's enormity. There is little
hope they will ever find their holy grail.
To demonstrate how vast such Borgian spaces are, Dawkins offered a prize to
anyone who could rebreed (or find by hit or miss!) an image of a chalice
that Dawkins had come upon by chance on one of his rambles in Biomorph Land.
He called it the Holy Grail. So sure was Dawkins of its deep concealment
that he offered $1,000 to the first person presenting him with the genes to
the Holy Grail. "Offering my own money," said Dawkins, "was my way of saying
nobody was going to find it." Much to his astonishment, within one year of
his challenge, Thomas Reed, a software engineer in California, reencountered
the cup. This appears akin to retracing the elder Borges's steps to locate
the lost palindrome book, or the feat of finding Out of Control in the
Library of Borges.
But Biomorph Land supplies assistance. Because its genesis reflects
Dawkins's professional interests as a biologist, it was built on organic
principles in addition to evolution. The secondary biological nature of
biomorphs permitted Reed to find the chalice.
Dawkins saw that in order to make a practical biological universe, he would
have to restrict the possibilities of forms to those that held some
biological sense. Otherwise, the sheer vastness of all shapes would
overwhelm any ordinary chance of finding enough biological morphs to play
with-even using the cumulative selection method. After all, he reasoned, the
embryonic development of living creatures limits the possibilities of what
they can mutate into. For instance, most biological creatures display
left-right symmetry; by instituting left-right symmetry as a fundamental
element of every biomorph, Dawkins could reduce the overall size of the
Library, thus making it easier to find a biomorph. He called this reduction
a "constrained embryology." The task he set for himself was to design an
embryology that was restricted, but in "biologically interesting
directions."
"Very early I had a strong intuitive conviction that the embryology I wanted
should be recursive. My intuition was based partly upon the fact that
embryology in real life can be thought of as recursive," Dawkins told me. By
recursive embryology, Dawkins meant that simple rules iterated over and over
again (including rules that play upon their own results) would furnish much
of the complexity of the final form. For instance, as the recursive rule
"grow one unit then fork into two" is applied over successive generations to
a starting stick, it will produce a bushy many-forked thing after about five
iterations.
Secondly, Dawkins introduced the idea of gene and body into the Library. He
saw that a string of letters (as in a book) is directly analogous to
biological genes. (A gene is even represented as a string of letters in the
formal notation of biochemistry.) The genes produce the tissues of the body.
"But," says Dawkins, "biological genes don't control small fragments of the
body, which would be the equivalent of controlling pixels on monitor.
Instead, genes control growing rules-embryological developmental
processes-or in Biomorph Land, drawing algorithms." Thus, a string of
numbers or text acts as string of genes (a chromosome), which represents a
formula, which then draws the image (body) in pixels.
The consequences of this indirect way of generating forms was that almost
any random place in the Library-that is, almost any genes-produced a
coherent biological shape. By having genes control algorithms rather than
pixels, Dawkins built an inherent grammar into his universe which prevented
any old nonsense from appearing. Even a wild mutation would not arrive at a
flat gray blob. The same transformation could be done to the Library of
Borges. Rather than each shelf place in the Library representing a possible
arrangement of letters, each place could represent a possible arrangement of
words, or even of possible sentences. Then, any book you picked out would at
least be close to readable. This enhanced space of word strings is much
smaller than the space of letter strings, but also, as Dawkins suggested,
restricted in a more interesting direction: you are more likely to come
across something comprehensible.
Dawkins's introduction of genes that behaved in a biological manner-each
mutation affecting many pixels in a structured way-not only shrunk the
biomorph library's size, distilling it to functional forms, but also
provided an alternative way for human breeders to find a form. Any subtle
shift made in the biomorph gene space would amplify into a noticeable and
dependable shift in graphic image.
This gave Thomas Reed, freelance knight of the Holy Grail, a second way of
breeding. Reed repeatedly altered genes of a parent form while observing the
visual changes in forms the genes produced in order to learn how to steer a
shape by altering individual genes. In this way he could steer to various
biomorph forms by twiddling the gene dial. In an obvious analogy, Dawkins
called this mode in his program "genetic engineering." As in the real world,
it holds uncanny power.
In effect, Dawkins lost his $1,000 to the first genetic engineer of
artificial life. Thomas Reed spent his lunch hours at work hunting for the
chalice in Dawkins's program. Six months after Dawkins announced his
contest, Reed converged upon the lost treasure by a combination of breeding
images and genetically engineering their genes. Breeding is a way to
brainstorm fast and loose; engineering is a way to fine-tune and control. Of
the forty hours Reed estimated he spent hunting for the cup, he spent 38 of
them engineering. "There is no way I could have found it by breeding," he
said. As he closed in on the cup, Reed couldn't get the last pixel to budge
without getting everything else to move. He spent many hours trying to
control that single pixel in the penultimate form.
In a coincidence that completely astonished Dawkins, two other finders
independently submitted correct gene solutions to the Holy Grail within
weeks after Reed. They too were able to pinpoint his chalice in an
astronomically large space of possibilities, not by breeding alone, but
primarily by genetic engineering and, in one case, by reverse engineering.
- Evolving Art, Altering Rule Based Processes to Generate Varieties of Form,
Selection
Perhaps because of the visual nature of Biomorph Land, the first people to
incorporate Dawkins's idea of computational breeding were artists. The first
was a fellow Brit, William Latham; later Karl Sims in Boston would take
artificial evolution further.
The exhibited work of William Latham in the early 1980s resembled a parts
catalog from some unfathomable alien contraption. On a wall of paper, Latham
drew a simple form, such as a cone, at the top center, and then filled the
rest of the space with gradually complexifying cone shapes. Each new shape
was generated by rules that Latham had devised. Thin lines connected one
shape to its modified descendant shapes. Often, multiple variations would
split off one form. By the bottom of these giant pages, the cone forms had
metamorphosed into ornate pyramids and art-deco mounds. The logical
structure of the drawing was a family tree, but with many common
cross-marriages. The entire field was packed; it looked more like a network
or circuit.
Latham called this "obsessive, rule-based process" of generating varieties
of forms and selecting certain offspring to develop further, "FormSynth."
Originally he used FormSynth as a tool to brainstorm ideas for possible
sculptures. He would select a particularly pleasing form lifted from the map
of his sketches and then sculpt the intricate shape in wood or plastic. One
of Latham's gallery catalogs shows a modest black statue with a resemblance
to an African mask that Latham created (or found) using FormSynth. But
sculpting was so time-consuming, and in a way superfluous, that he ceased
doing it. What most interested him was that vast uncharted Library of
possible forms. Latham: "My focus shifted from producing a single sculpture
to producing millions of sculptures, each spawning a further million
sculptures. My work of art was now the whole evolutionary tree of
sculptures."
Inspired by an avalanche of dazzling 3-D computer graphics in the U.S. in
the late 1980s, Latham took up computing as a way to automate his form
generation. He collaborated with programmers at an IBM research station in
Hampshire, England. Together they modified a 3-D modeling program to produce
mutant forms. For about a year artist Latham manually typed in or edited
gene values in his shape-generating program to produce wonderfully complete
trees of possible forms. By modifying a form's code by hand, Latham could
search the space at random. With understatement Latham recalls this manual
search as being "laborious."
In 1986, after encountering the newly published Biomorph program, Latham
merged the heart of Dawkins's evolutionary engine with the sophisticated
skin of his three-dimensional forms. This union birthed the idea of an
evolutionary art program. Latham dubbed his method "the Mutator." The
Mutator functioned almost identically to Dawkins's mutating engine. The
program generated offspring of a current form, each with slight differences.
However, instead of stick figures, Latham's forms were fleshy and sensual.
They popped into one's consciousness in three dimensions, with shadows.
Whole eye-riveting beasts were drummed up by the hi-octane IBM graphics
computer. The artist then selected the best of the 3-D progeny. That best
form became the next parent, begetting other mutations. Over many
generations, the artist would evolve a completely new three-dimensional body
in a true Borgian Library. Biomorph Land-huge as it was-was only a subset of
Latham's space.
Echoing Dawkins, Latham states, "I had not anticipated the variety of
sculpture types which my software could create. There appears no limit to
the wealth of different forms that can be created using this method." The
forms Latham retrieved, rendered in mind-boggling detail, include
elaborately woven baskets, marbled giant eggs, double mushroom-things,
twisty antlers from another planet, gourds, fantastical microbial beasts,
starfish gone punk, and a swirling multi-arm Shiva god from outer space that
Latham calls "Mutation Y1."
"A garden of unearthly delights," Latham calls his collection of forms.
Rather than try to imitate the motif of earthly life, Latham is after
alternative organic forms, "something more savage" than life on Earth. He
remembers visiting a county fair and stopping by an artificial insemination
tent and seeing photographs of gigantic mutant superbulls and other kinds of
"useless" freaks. He finds these bizarre forms inspiring.
The printouts are surrealistically clear, as if photographed in the vacuum
of the moon. Every form possesses a startling organic feel to it. These
things are not copies of nature but natural shapes that do not exist on
Earth. Latham: "The machine gave me freedom to explore forms which
previously had not been accessible to me, as they had been beyond my
imagination."
Deep in the recesses of the Borgian Library, racks of graceful antlers,
shelves of left-handed snails, rows of dwarf flowering trees, and trays of
lady bugs await their first visitor, whether that be nature or artist. As
yet, neither nature nor artist has reached them. They remain unthought of,
unseen, unmaterialized, mere possible forms. As far as we know, evolution is
the only way to reach them.
The Library contains all the forms of life past and life future and even,
perhaps, the shape of life present on other planets. We are blocked by our
own natural prejudices from contemplating these alternative life forms in
any detail. Our minds quickly drift back to what we know as natural. We can
give it a momentary thought, but we balk at filling in much detail on so
whimsical a fantasy. But evolution can be harnessed to serve as a wild
bronco to carry us where we can't go by ourselves. On this untamed transport
we arrive at a place stuffed with odd bodies, fully imagined (not by us)
down to the last hair.
Karl Sims, CM5's artist, told me, "I use evolution for two reasons. One, to
breed things I would have never thought of, nor would have found any other
way. And, two, to create things in great detail that I might have thought
of, but would never have time to draw."
- Discontinuities, Up/Down Peaks, Puncuated Equilibria, Sex, Types of Genes
Mixing
Both Sims and Latham stumbled upon discontinuities in the Library. "You
develop a feel for what kinds of things can happen in an evolutionary
space," Sims claims. He reported that he often would be evolving away,
making satisfactory progress-sort of whistling happily while things
noticeably improved-when suddenly he'd hit a wall and the improvements would
plateau. Even drastic choices would not "move" the sluggish form away from
the rut it seemed stuck in. Generation after generation of progeny seemed to
get no better. It was as if he were trapped on a large local desert basin
where one step was identical to the next and the interesting peaks were far
away.
As Thomas Reed stalked the lost chalice in Biomorph Land, he often needed to
back up. He would be near the cup but getting nowhere. He often saved
intermediate forms on his long chase. Once he needed to retreat hundreds of
steps back to the sixth archived form in order to get out of a dead end.
Latham reported similar experiences while exploring his space. He often ran
into what he called a territory of instabilities. In some regions of
possible forms, significant changes in genes would effect only insignificant
shifts in forms-Sims's basin of stagnation. He'd have to really push the
genes miles around to move an inch in form. Yet, in other regions, minute
changes in genes would produce huge alterations in form. In the former,
Latham's progress through the space was glacial; in the latter, his tiniest
move would send him rapidly careening through the Library at a zoom.
To avoid overshooting a destination of possible form, and to accelerate its
discovery, Latham would purposefully twirl a mutation knob as he explored.
At first he'd set the mutation rate high, to skip through the space. As the
shapes became more interesting, he'd turn the mutation rate down so that
each generation sliced thinner, and he'd slowly creep up to a concealed
shape. Sims wired his system to perform a similar trick automatically. As
the image he was evolving became more complex, his software would crank down
the mutation rate for a soft landing on the final form. "Otherwise," Sims
says, "things can get crazy as you are trying to fine-tune an image."
These frontiersmen developed a couple of other tricks for traveling through
the Library. The most important trick was sex. Dawkins's Biomorph Land was a
fertile, but puritanical, place that hadn't a hint of sex. All variation in
Biomorph Land occurred by asexual mutations from a single parent. Sims's and
Latham's worlds, in contrast, were driven by sex. A major lesson the
frontiersmen realized was that you could do sex in an evolutionary system in
any number of ways!
There was of course the orthodox missionary position: two parents, with
genes from each. But even that plain vanilla mating can be accomplished in
several ways. In the Library, breeding is analogous to taking two books and
merging their text to form a child-book. You can beget two kinds of progeny:
in-betweener books or outsider books.
In-betweener offspring inherit a position in between Mommy and Daddy.
Imagine a beeline in the Library bridging Book A and Book B. Any child (Book
C) would be found somewhere in the Library on that imaginary line.
In-between offspring can be exactly halfway in between as they would be if
they inherited exactly half of their genes from Pop and half from Mom. Or,
they can be in-between at some other proportion, say 10 percent Mom and 90
percent Dad. In-betweeners can also inherit alternating chapters from Book A
and Book B, or alternating clumps of genes from Mommy and Daddy. This method
retains genes that may be linked to each other by a proximal function,
making it more likely to accumulate "good stuff."
Another way to think of in-betweeners is to imagine creature A morphing-in
the Hollywood term-into creature B. All the creatures it morphs through on
its way from A to B are the pair's possible in-betweener offspring.
Outsider offspring inherit a position outside of the morph-line between
Mommy and Daddy. Rather than some random halfway stage between a lion and
snake, they are a chimera boasting a lion's head with a snake's tail and
forked tongue. There are several different ways to generate chimera,
including the pretty basic one of fishing in a potluck stew of random traits
possessed either by Mom or Dad. Outsider offspring are wilder, less
expected, more out of control.
But that's not the end of the weirdness feasible in evolutionary systems.
Mating can also be perverse. William Latham is currently playing around with
polygamy in his system. Why limit mating to two parents? Latham coded his
system to allow him to choose up to five parents and assign each parent
varying weights of inheritability. So he says to his brood of children
forms: next time give me something very much like this one, that one, and
that one, and somewhat like this one, and a little bit like that one. Then
he marries them together and they co-procreate the next brood. Latham can
also assign negative values: as in, not like this one. In effect he has made
an antiparent. When an antiparent mates in multiple marriages it sires (or
not-sires) children as unlike it as possible.
- Tunnelling Selective Process Through "Form Space" by Combining/Honing in
on Features
Moving further still from natural biology (at least as far as we know it)
Latham hacked a program for Mutator which follows the breeder's progress
through the Library. Genes that persist over a particular breeding course,
the Mutator assumes the breeder likes. It makes those genes dominant. Genes
that keep changing, the Mutator reads as "experimental" and unsatisfying to
the breeder, so it reduces their impact by declaring them recessive in any
mating.
The idea of tracking evolution in order to anticipate its future course is
bewitching. Both Sims and Latham dream about an artificial intelligence
module that could analyze a breeder's progress through form space. The AI
program would deduce the common element shared by the selections and then
reach far ahead into the Library to retrieve a form that encapsulates that
trait.
At the Pompidou Center in Paris, and at the Ars Electronica Festival in
Linz, Austria, Karl Sims installed a public version of his artificial
evolution universe. In the middle of a long gallery space, a Connection
Machine hummed on a platform. The jet-black cube was vested in flickering
red lights, which syncopated as the machine thought. A heavy cable connected
the supercomputer to an arc of 20 large monitors. A footpad on the floor sat
in front of each color screen in the crescent. By stepping on a footpad
(which covers a switch) a museum-goer chose a particular image out of the
row.
I had a chance to breed CM2 images in Linz. To start, I selected what looked
like an impression of poppies in a garden. Instantly, Sims's program bred 20
new offspring of the flowers. Two screens filled with gray rubbish, the
other 18 displayed new "flowers," some fragmented, some in new colors. At
each turn I tried to see how flowery I could push the image. I quickly
worked up a sweat running from pad to pad in the computer-heated room. The
physical work felt like gardening-nurturing shapes into existence. I kept
evolving more elaborate floral patterns, until another visitor shifted the
direction toward wild fluorescent plaids. I was dumbfounded by the range of
beautiful images that the system uncovered: geometric still lifes,
hallucinogenic landscapes, alien textures, eerie logos. One after another
elaborate, brilliantly colored composition would appear on the monitors and
then, unchosen, retreat forever.
Sims's installation breeds all day, every day, bending its evolution to the
fancy of the passing mob of international museum visitors. The Connection
Machine records every choice, and every choice leading up to the choice.
Sims now has a database of what humans (at least art museum humans) find
beautiful or interesting. He believes that these inarticulate qualities can
be abstracted from such a rich trove of data and then used as a selection
criteria for future breeding in other regions of the Library.
Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection
criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find
beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have
individual favorites. Overall, a monarch butterfly is no more or less
striking than its host, the milkweed pod. If inspected without prejudice,
parasitic beasts are beautiful. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature
resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important
fact that the form must work biologically as a whole.
Still, something distinguishes the selected forms, no matter what they are,
from the speckled gray noise that surrounds them. Comparing the chosen to
the random may tell us much about beauty and even help us figure out what we
mean by "complexity."
- A-Fish, 56 Genes / 800 Parameters, "Roe" 250 Times More Compact than Grown
Result
The Russian programmer Vladimir Pokhilko reminds me that evolving for beauty
alone may be a sufficient goal. Pokhilko and partner Alexey Pajitnov (who
wrote the famously addictive computer game Tetris) designed a very powerful
selection program that breeds virtual aquarium fish. Pokhilko told me during
early work on the game, "When we started we didn't want to use the computer
to make something very practical, but to make something very beautiful."
Pokhilko and Pajitnov did not set out to make an evolutionary world. "Our
starting point was ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging flowers. We wanted
to make some kind of computer ikibana. But we wanted something alive,
moving. And which never repeats itself." Since the computer screen "looks
like an aquarium, we decided to make a customizable aquarium."
Users become artists by filling the aquarium with the right combinations of
colored fishes and quantities of swaying seaweeds. Users would need a large
variety of organisms. Why not let the aquarist breed their own? Thus
"El-Fish" was hatched, and the Russians found themselves in the evolution
game.
El-Fish became a monster of a program. It was mostly written in Moscow
during a time when smart U.S. entrepreneurs could hire a entire unemployed
Russian university math department for the salary of one U.S. hacker. Up to
50 Russian programmers, ignorant of Dawkins, Latham, and Sims, wrote code
for El-Fish, rediscovering the power and method of computational evolution.
The commercial version of El-Fish, released by the U.S. software publisher
Maxis in 1993, compresses the kind of flamboyant visual breeding done by
Latham on large IBMs and Sims on a Connection Machine into a small desktop
home computer.
Each El-Fish has 56 genes which define 800 parameters (a huge Library). The
colorful fish swim in a virtual underwater world realistically, turning with
the flick of a fin as fish do. They weave between strands of kelp (also bred
by the program). They pace back and forth endlessly. They school around food
when you "feed" them. They never die. When I first saw an El-Fish aquarium
from ten paces away, I took it to be a video of a real aquarium.
The really fun part is breeding fish. I got started by dipping a net
somewhat randomly into a map of the hypothetical El-Fish ocean, fishing for
a couple of exotic parent fish. Different areas shelter different fish. The
ocean is, in fact, the Library. I hauled up two fish which I kept: a plump
yellow fish spotted in green with a thin dorsal fin and an overbite (the
Mama) and a puny blue torpedo-shaped guy with a Chinese junk sail of a top
fin (the Pa). I could evolve from either, that is, I could asexually mutate
new fish from either the fat yellow one or the tiny blue one, or I could
mate the pair and select from their joint offspring. I chose sex.
As in the other artificial evolution programs, about a dozen mutated
offspring appeared on the screen. I could slide a knob to adjust the
mutation rate. I was into fins. I chose a large-finned one, pushing its
shape each generation toward increasingly ornate, heavy-duty fins. I got one
fish that seemed to be all fins, top, bottom, side. I moved it from the
incubator and animated it before plunking it into the aquarium (the
animation procedure can take minutes or hours depending on the computer).
After many generations of increasingly weird finny fish, I evolved a fish so
freakish that it wouldn't breed anymore. This is the El-Fish program's way
of keeping the fish, fish. I had entered the outer boundaries in the Library
beyond which the forms are less than fishlike. El-Fish won't render nonfish
creatures, and it won't animate unorthodox fish because it's too hard to
make a monster move. (The code relies on standard fish proportions to keep a
creature's movements convincing.) Part of the game is users trying to figure
out where those fishy limits lie and whether there are any loopholes.
Storing full fish consumes far too much disk memory, so only the bare genes
of the fish are filed. These tiny seeds of genes are called "roe." Roe are
250 times more compact than the fish they grow into. El-Fish aficionados
swap the roe of selected creations over modem lines or stock them in digital
public libraries.
One of the programmers at Maxis in charge of testing El-Fish discovered an
interesting way to explore the outer limits of the fish Library. Instead of
breeding or fishing the pool for sample stock, he inserted the text of his
name (Roger) into a roe. Out came a short black tadpole. Pretty soon
everyone in the office had a tadpole in their El-Fish tank. Roger wondered
what else he could transform into fish roe. He took the digital text of the
Gettysburg Address and grew the digits into a ghostly creature-a pale face
trailing a deformed batwing. The wags dubbed it a "Gettyfish." Hacking
around they discovered that a sequence of about 2,000 digits of any sort can
be shanghaied into serving as roe for a possible fish. Getting into the
swing of things, the project manager for El-Fish loaded the spreadsheet of
his budget into El-Fish and birthed the bad omen of a fish skull, fangy
mouth, and dragon body.
- Evolutionary Artists as Gardeners, Domesticating by Selecting Finds &
Breeding Further
Breeding was once a craft belonging solely to the gardener. It is now
available to the painter, the musician, the inventor. William Latham
predicts evolutionism as the next stage in modern art. In evolutionism, the
borrowed concepts of mutation and sexual reproduction spawn the art. Instead
of painting or creating textures for computer graphic models, artist Sims
evolves them. He drifts into a region of woodlike patterns and then evolves
his way to the exact grainy, knot-ridden piney look which he can use to
color a wall in a video he is making.
You can now do this on a Macintosh with a commercial template for Adobe
Photoshop software. Written by Kai Krause, the Texture Mutator lets ordinary
computer owners breed textures from a choice of eight offspring every
generation.
Evolutionism reverses the modern trend in the design of artist's tools that
bends toward greater analytical control. The ends of evolution are more
subjective ("survival of the most aesthetic"), less controlled, more related
to art generated in a dream or trance; more found.
The evolutionary artist creates twice. First, the artist acts as god by
concocting a world, or a system for generating beauty. Second, he is the
gardener and curator of this made world, interpreting and presenting the
chosen works he nurtures. He fathers rather than molds a creation into
existence.
At the moment the tools of exploratory evolution restrict an artist to begin
with a random or primitive start. The next advance in evolutionism is to be
able to begin with a human-designed pattern and then arbitrarily breed from
there. Ideally, you would like to be able to pick up, say, a colorful logo
or label that needed work (or mind-altering modification) and progressively
evolve from that.
The outlines of such a commercial software are pretty clear. Will Wright,
SimCity author and founder of Maxis, the innovative software publisher
behind El-Fish, even came up with the perfect jazzy title: DarwinDraw. In
DarwinDraw you sketch a new corporate logo. Every line, curve, dot, or paint
stroke of the image you create is rendered into mathematical functions. When
you are done, you have a logo on a screen and a mutable set of functions as
genes in the computer. Then you breed the logo. You let it evolve outlandish
designs you could never have thought of, in detail you don't have time to
do. You jump around randomly at first, just to brainstorm. Then you hone in
on an unusual and striking arrangement. You turn the mutation rate down, use
multiple marriages and antiparenting to fine-tune it to its final version.
You now have an obsessively detailed evolved artwork with cross-hatching and
filigrees you wouldn't believe. Because the image is based on algorithms, it
has infinite resolution; you can blow it up as large as you like with
unexpected detail to spare. Print it!
As a demo of this power of evolutionism, Sims scanned the logo of CM5 into
his program and used it as a starting image to breed an "improved" CM5 logo.
Rather than the sterile modern look, it had frilly organic lines around the
edges of the letters. Folks in the office liked the evolved artwork so much
that they decided to make a T-shirt out of it. "I'd really love to evolve
neckties," Sims says. His other suggestions: "How about evolving textile
patterns, wallpaper designs, or type fonts?"
- Commercial Uses of Breeding & Steering, Copyrighting; Breeder or
Programmer?
IBM has been supporting artist William Latham's evolution experiments
because the global corporation realizes there is commercial potential here.
While Sims's evolution machine is, according to Latham, "a grammar that is
more ragged, more uncontrolled," Latham's is more controlled and useful to
engineers. IBM is turning the evolutionary tools Latham developed over to
automobile designers and having them mutate car body shapes. One of the
questions they are trying to answer is whether evolutionary design
techniques are more useful in the beginning of rough ideas or later in fine
tuning, or both. IBM intends to make a profitable project out of it. And not
only for cars. They imagine evolutionary "steering" tools useful for all
kinds of design problems entailing large numbers of parameters which require
a user to "back up" to a stored previous solution. Latham pictures evolution
taking root in packaging design, where the outer parameters are firmly fixed
(size and shape of the container), but where what happens within that space
is wide open. Here evolution can bring in multiple levels of detail that a
human artist would never have the time, energy, or money to do. The other
advantage of evolutionary industrial design, Latham has slowly come to
realize, is that it is perfectly suited to design by committee. The more
people that play, the better.
The copyright status of an artificially evolved creation is in legal limbo.
Who gets the protection, the artist who bred or the artist who created the
program? In the future, lawyers may demand a record of the evolutionary path
an artist followed to arrive at an evolved creation as evidence that such
work belongs to him and was not copied, or due to the creator of the
Library. As Dawkins showed, in a truly large Library it's improbable to find
a pattern more than once. Owning an evolutionary pathway to a particular
point demonstrates irrefutable proof that the artist found that destination
originally, since evolution doesn't strike twice.
- Finding a Book Equivalent to Writing it, Info/Time/Energy to Sort Exceeds
Creating it
In the end, breeding a useful thing becomes almost as miraculous as creating
one. Richard Dawkins echoes this when he asserts that "effective searching
procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large,
indistinguishable from true creativity." In the library of all possible
books, finding a particular book is equivalent to writing it.
This sentiment was recognized centuries ago, long before the advent of
computers. As Denis Diderot wrote in 1755:
The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time
will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books
as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as
convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be
to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
William Poundstone, author of The Recursive Universe, contrived an analogy
to illustrate why searching huge Borgian libraries of knowledge is as
difficult as searching the huge Borgian library of nature itself. Imagine,
Poundstone said, that there is a library with all possible videos. Like all
Borgian spaces, most of the items in this library are full of noise and
random grayness. A typical tape would be two hours of snow. The main problem
with searching for a viewable video is that no title, call name, or symbol
of any sort could represent a random tape in any less space or time than the
tape itself. Most of the items in a Borgian library are incompressible into
anything shorter than the work itself. (This irreducibility is the current
definition of randomness.) To search the tapes, they must be watched, and
therefore the information, time, and energy needed to sort through all the
tapes would exceed the information, time, and energy needed to create the
tape you wanted, no matter what the tape was.
Evolution is a slow-witted way to outsmart this conundrum, but what we call
intelligence is nothing more (and nothing less) than a tunnel through it. If
I had been especially astute in my search in the Library for my book Out of
Control, after several hours I might have discerned a cardinal direction to
my wanderings through the library stacks. I might have noticed that in
general, "sense" lay to the left of the last book I held. I could have
anticipated many generations of slow evolution by running ahead miles to the
left. I might have learned the architecture of the library and predicted
where sense would hide, outrunning both random guessing and creeping
evolution. I could have found Out of Control by a combination of evolution
and by learning the inherent order of the Library.
Some students of the human mind make a strong argument that thinking is a
type of evolution of ideas within the brain. According to this argument, all
created things are evolved. As I write these words, I have to agree. I began
this book not with a sentence formed in my mind but with an arbitrarily
chosen phrase, "I am." Then in unconsciously rapid succession I evaluated a
headful of possible next words. I picked one that seemed esthetically fit,
"sealed." After "I am sealed," I went on to the next word, choosing from
among 100,000s of possible ones. Each selected word bred the choices for the
next until I had evolved almost a sentence of words. Toward the end of the
sentence my choices were constrained somewhat by the words I had already
chosen at the beginning, so learning helped the breeding go more quickly.
But the first word of the next sentence could have been any word. The end of
my book, 150,000 choices away, looked as distant and improbable as the end
of the galaxy. A book is improbable. Out of all the books written or to be
written in the world, only this book, for instance, would have found the
preceding two sentences in a row.
Now that I'm in the middle of the book, I'm still evolving the text. What
will the next words be that I write in this chapter? In a real sense I don't
know. There are probably billions of possibilities of what they might be,
even taking into account the restriction that they must logically follow
from the last sentence. Did you guess this sentence as the next one? I
didn't either. But that's the sentence I found at the end of the sentence.
I wrote this book by finding it. I found it in the Library of Borges by
evolving it at my desk. Word by word, I traveled through the Library of
Jorge Luis Borges. By some kind of weird combination of learning and
evolution that our heads do, I found my book. It was on the middle shelf,
almost at eye level, in the seventh hexagon of region 52427. Who knows if it
is my book or merely one that is almost my book (differing by a paragraph
here or there, or maybe even by the omission of a few critical facts)?
The great satisfaction of the long search for me-no matter how the book
fares-was that only I could find it.
http://www.kk.org/books/index.php
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201483408/
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Craig Franck" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 05:37:11 PM |
|
|
"AbhiEJeet" wrote
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Integers can be seen as correspondences between sets of things.
"Five-ness" is a correspondence between a set of things and the
fingers on one hand. "One" is a correspondence between my belly
button(s) and the moon(s) of Earth.
But systems such as arithmetic need to be constructed out of
basic logic and defined. By this reasoning, "one" wasn't part of a
defined system of numbers, so its existence was quasi at best
because you not only need an instance of things (one God), but
also an instance of definition.
So about all it amounts to is 1 + 1 = 1 + 1 must be true at all times.
--
Craig Franck
craig.franck@verizon.net
Cortland, NY
.
|
|
|
| User: "stoney" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 12:36:16 PM |
|
|
On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 23:37:11 GMT, "Craig Franck"
<craig.franck@verizon.net> wrote in alt.atheism
"AbhiEJeet" wrote
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Integers can be seen as correspondences between sets of things.
"Five-ness" is a correspondence between a set of things and the
fingers on one hand. "One" is a correspondence between my belly
button(s) and the moon(s) of Earth.
But systems such as arithmetic need to be constructed out of
basic logic and defined. By this reasoning, "one" wasn't part of a
defined system of numbers, so its existence was quasi at best
because you not only need an instance of things (one God), but
also an instance of definition.
So about all it amounts to is 1 + 1 = 1 + 1 must be true at all times.
According to Christians 1+1+1=1
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a cornucopia of splinters.
.
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Turtoni" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 12:26:17 AM |
|
|
Question arise, who created figure 1?
One (heh) level of deconstruction might be:
"1" communicates a significance.
The origins of significances orientate around the biological needs of
survival.
Digging deeper into reasoning behind why the survival? gets a little more
complicated.
(Also every word should have quotes around it to signify the fact that
your/my mileages may vary as to what those words actually mean.)
.
|
|
|
| User: "Adrian" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 02:12:46 AM |
|
|
Turtoni wrote:
Question arise, who created figure 1?
One (heh) level of deconstruction might be:
"1" communicates a significance.
The origins of significances orientate around the biological needs of
survival.
Digging deeper into reasoning behind why the survival? gets a little more
complicated.
(Also every word should have quotes around it to signify the fact that
your/my mileages may vary as to what those words actually mean.)
But, my ""1"" means something slighty different from your ""1"".
We're DOOMED!
.
|
|
|
| User: "Turtoni" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
19 Feb 2006 02:20:25 AM |
|
|
"Adrian" <adriansdurham@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140336766.732972.243300@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Turtoni wrote:
Question arise, who created figure 1?
One (heh) level of deconstruction might be:
"1" communicates a significance.
The origins of significances orientate around the biological needs of
survival.
Digging deeper into reasoning behind why the survival? gets a little more
complicated.
(Also every word should have quotes around it to signify the fact that
your/my mileages may vary as to what those words actually mean.)
But, my ""1"" means something slighty different from your ""1"".
We're DOOMED!
That's 1 way of looking at it. heh.
Language dooms things down.
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Wordsmith" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 02:59:01 PM |
|
|
AbhiEJeet wrote:
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
The idea of one-ness existed before any numerical figures.
W : )
.
|
|
|
| User: "Brian Fletcher" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 04:31:39 PM |
|
|
"Wordsmith" <wordsmith@rocketmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140296341.407482.191350@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
AbhiEJeet wrote:
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
The idea of one-ness existed before any numerical figures.
W : )
I would say the "actuality" of oneness always ""is". The idea is only the
idea.
BOfL
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Uncle Vic" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 03:53:03 PM |
|
|
on 18 Feb 2006 in alt.atheism, dear sweet Wordsmith
(wordsmith@rocketmail.com) made the light shine upon us with this:
AbhiEJeet wrote:
If god creates a planet, obviously he will say that there is 'one'
planet. He might have created planet but the figure 1 automatically
comes with planet. God does not need to create figure 1.
This implies that figure 1 was in existence even before creation and
even before god.
Question arise, who created figure 1?
Bugs.
The idea of one-ness existed before any numerical figures.
So did zero-ness, but it took man millennia to figure it out.
--
Uncle Vic
aa#2011
Supervisor, EAC Department of little adhesive-backed "L" shaped
chrome-plastic doo-dads to add feet to Jesus fish department
Official alt.wisdom HELLBOY
.
|
|
|
| User: "Matt Silberstein" |
|
| Title: Re: Does one needs to be created? |
18 Feb 2006 10:31:04 PM |
|
|
| | |
