On Feb 26, 4:34 pm,

On 26 Feb 2007 13:21:20 -0800, "Budikka666" <budik...@netscape.net>
wrote:

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/02/24/evolving_robotspeak.php
"Then the scientists allowed the robots to evolve. The robots--a
thousand of them in each trial of the experiment--started out with
neural networks that were wired at random. They were placed in groups
of ten in arenas with poison and food, and they all wandered in a
haze. If a robot happened to reach the food and detected the gray
paper, the scientists awarded it a point. If it ended up by the poison
source, it lost a point. The scientists observed each robot over the
course of ten minutes and added up all their points during that time.
(This part of the experiment was run on a computer simulation to save
time and to be able to evolve lots of robots at once.)

In the simplest version of the experiment, the scientists selected the
top 200 feeders. Not surprisingly, they were all pretty awful, since
they had randomly wired neural networks. But they had promise. The
scientists "bred" the robots by creating 100 pairs and using parts of
each one's program to create a new one. Each new program also had a
small chance of spontaneously changing in one part (how strongly it
reacted to the red light, for example). After several rounds of this
mating, the new programs were plugged back into robots, which then
groped around again for food. And once again the scientists selected
the fastest ones. They repeated this cycle 500 times in 20 different
replicate lines. When they were done, they plugged the program into
real robots and let them loose in a real arena with real food and
poison (well, as real as food and poison get for experimental robots).
The real robots behaved just like the simulated ones, demonstrating
that the simulation had gotten the physics of the real robots right."

Now if a little simple computer program that doesn't define any end
results ends up producing complex behavior from simple rules, and
those rules work in the real world where is the foundation for
claiming the world needed a designer?

Nowhere - except in the minds of the Believers.

Unfortunately, that's "good enough" for making
public policy decisions in Kansas and elsewhere.

You might want to peruse Stephen Wolframs book "A New
Kind of Science" :

http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/1579550088/...

It's a huge tome on the subject of "cellular automata" and how
the emergent behaviors that appear when the little "cells"
interact with each other according to simple rules seem to
have a lot in common with natural-world phenomena, perhaps
even a clue how 'superstrings' wind up creating our reality
and everything in it.

Both with the abovedescribed robotics experiment in "natural
selection" and with Wolframs automata we can see how "simple"
easily leads to "complex" without the need for detailed
"design".

The flaw in the robot experiment was in limiting the "mutations"
to such narrow bits of the machines "genome". In the real world,
mutations are pretty random, as likely to cause a fatal liver
metabolism flaw as improve ones ability to find a red light
district. To be more honest, they need to repeat the experiment
using MANY more simulated robots (which should be OK within
limits since their real robots behaved like their simulations)
and allow mutation of ANY part of their "genome". Actually,
they need to add even the physical FORM of the sim-bot to
the 'genome' so THAT can change, improve, or go horribly
wrong too.

IMHO, pure mutation is not an adequate mechanism to drive
speciation in the real world, it's just TOO random, TOO
capable of doing more harm than good. Elsewhere I've
proposed that cellular feedback mechanisms which regulate
gene expression, seemingly with more "intelligence" than
random mutation, might be the seeds of speciation. The
DNA eventually takes the "hints" provided - NON-randomly
mutating. This feedback mechanism co-evolved over time,
perhaps not explicitly encoded in the DNA but, like the
automata, an emergent behavior between cytoplasm and DNA
which benifits the cell and organism as a whole.

Such mechanisms can also be investigated using simulation
software - and we won't have to wait a billion years or
so to see what happens.

I'd read that book, but I don't have the strength to lift it...!