Artificial LIfe ENvironment (ALIEN) is an artificial life simulation tool

After some review, no, I do not think I would alone use "in" in somehow, I guess, circunscribing the probable, positive effects that I meant of emergence and network effects to ML.-

In a certain sense, I think there's something "fundamental", a primitive, to ML and Transformers and such "big-data" and information techniques such as they are being applied to AI, that puts them up there with emergent phenomena and network effects in terms of constituting (or manifesting, or following, or embodying ....) some very fundamental principles.-

So, in a sense, I am more and more leaning towards thinking that (particularly when applied to AI and the search for AGI) "primitives" such as emergence (particularly) are somehow to be brought to bear ...

PS. As an illustration, look into JEPA and other more "holistic" approaches to simulating or achieving the "I" in AI. Approaches that are made up of very complex systems interacting with each other (some of which are Transformers, or verbal) but not entirely ...

Now, coming back to the "in", above ...

... could emergence and network effects have use in ML itself (as in, integrated or taken advantage of in these systems) and the answer would also be yes, I think.-

That is to say, emergence, network effects, ML ... consciousness perhaps, and other "fundamentals" might constitute - both as parts of larger solutions and incorporated within each other - useful building blocks ...

Along these lines, there are some interesting "intersections" that I am exploring:

- Bio electric signaling. Turns out neurons are great, but they are not the end-all of biological electrical signaling

- Proprioception in ML, AI (!), and, of course robotics. There's something about having a body or being "embodied" that has some bearing here I am sure ...

- JEPA (I and V) an other approaches that are hitting the problem from a more "holistic"/complex approach, trying to imitate or use "higher order" systems working together

We do live in interesting times :) (And, I do not mean this in the overloaded sense of the Chinese saying to one's enemies ...)

Interesting.-

PS. Taking this further, there might be a similar "blockade" to simulating intelligence. Or (definitely) consciousness ...

It may be, but is there any evidence of that or reason to believe it? How would one even go about defining that problem or proving that? With computer graphics we can produce worlds that approximate the real world well enough to understand and reason about them in similar ways, even though they don't really work like the real thing at all (e.g. hollow 3D objects suffice for a lot of things). Why could we not produce code that makes a character in that world pass for "intelligent"? We don't need to copy the model of life. We just need to understand what parts/features are necessary to create a system that has enough potential to develop something we find sufficiently interesting.

If you count the total area of earth and the age of earth, how big/long should be your simulation to have the same breadth as earth ?

I have been intrigued by artificial life because I think it takes a more holistic look at that question than AI. I feel like starting with the neuron is kind of a huge assumption, how have we ruled out or accounted for the importance of all the more basic building blocks and developmental milestones of life?

I also think the environment is critical. We formed and evolved as a product of our environment, we have to find food in it; our goals, behaviors and fitness level are largely dependent on/derived from it. An AI doesn't have an environment. It doesn't have any sense of living and being in a place. It can't care about anything. It's not going to see an apple fall and wonder why that happens. It's not alive or doing anything when it's not called to process an input into an output. It makes things up by stitching together words that it has no actual context or experienced meaning for. I find it hard to believe that we're going to achieve anything resembling the interesting characteristics of humans with these abstract Chinese Rooms.

An interesting conclusion, and one that I am sure has implications for artificially intelligent systems.-

This was the design: The environment was made of a small number of materials:

1-Non-life - blocks etc., obstructions

2-Plant-life - is food but not a creature, not mobile etc.

3-Creatures - alive and mobile (can be eaten by other creatures)

Creatures:

1-Shaped like hexagons

2-Eyes: Located on one of the sides of the hexagon

3-Mouth: A medium length proboscis type thing on same side as eyes

Touching plant or food with mouth=eating (which transfers energy)

4-Movement/Motor:

Can move forward or backward (based on which way pointing)

Can rotate to face new direction

Special neurons connect to the motor+rotator

5-Senses - Eyes:

Each eye had 32 rays of "light" that spread out in an expanding pattern

Each ray provided instant information

Information returned per ray: distance the ray traveled before hitting something, and type of material it hit

Each ray within each eye connected to a group of input neurons so distance and material could be input

6-Senses - Sound:

Each creature emitted waves of sound in decreasing amplitude in a full circle, like ripples in a pond

This signal traveled faster than creatures top speed but much slower than instant

Sound sensor neurons covered the entire "skin" of the creature

7-Senses - Body or Mouth touching other materials:

The mouth and entire skin had direct touch sensor neurons which detected the type of material being touched

Just like the eyes, if non-life material was being interacted with then one neuron fired, if plant then a different neuron, etc.

8-Senses - Body - being eaten:

The entire skin had special sensors for when another creatures mouth is physically touching this creature (meaning it's being eaten)

9-Brain:

Randomly created, then evolved per generation Many random/semi-random/ajustable factors controlled the higher level structure of the NN, examples:

Number of layers

Number of sections per layer (section=a group neurons more tightly connected intra-section compared to inter-section)

Percent connectivity within section

Percent connectivity between sections

Percent conectivity between layers

Percent of recurrent connetions (for each of the above)

Type of neurons (in total or per section)

Types of synapes (experimented with various things here) etc.

10-Fitness function

Basically amount of energy at end.

Creature starts with X, eating adds to it, moving reduces it, getting eaten reduces it

I needed to tweak this a bit because the naive version rewarded limited movement.

The creatures needed to evolve the ability to use their eyes, their motors, to respond to being eaten by another creature, to eat another creature (just by touchig with mouth). During the early generations they would just be jiggling around randomly, but eventually some would settle in to more productive movements.

I noticed that for long running sessions (7 days), the best creatures frequently had a NN structure that was deep-ish, like 6 layers, and came together in middle layers with many signals whittled down to a much smaller number of neurons before exploding out again to connect to the control neurons.

FWIW, I think most people studying this topic suspect that something like RNA (not DNA) was actually the original self-replicator.

Like another poster has said, evolution cannot exist, unless you have a self-replicating system. The meaning of evolution is that the replication process is imperfect, so the replicas are not completely identical to their parent system, i.e. they evolve. It is meaningless to talk about evolution unless you talk about a self-replicating system.

The existence of information-storing molecules, like RNA, is not necessary for a self-replicating chemical system. In fact it is pretty much certain that information-storing molecules did not exist in the first living entities.

In a self-replicating chemical system without nucleic acids there must exist a closed cycle of chemical reactions, each producing reactants needed by reactions located later in the cycle and where the net result is the conversion of the simple molecules from the environment, like carbon dioxide, dihydrogen, ammonia and sulfide or sulfite into complex organic substances, including peptides and organic acids, which are either catalysts or reactants or products for various reactions along the closed cycle. Such a closed cycle of reactions is likely to have appeared in pores of suitable minerals, like metallic sulfides, in hydrothermal vents or volcanic vents that supplied the input gases.

The difference between the first self-replicating chemical systems and the living beings with nucleic acids is the same as between hardwired control automata and microprogrammed control automata (where the control information is stored in a microprogram memory). The use of a memory (i.e. nucleic acids) has greatly accelerated the evolution of living beings, because previously any changes in the components of a self-replicating chemical system would have been very likely to result in a system that could no longer replicate, so it would die without descendants.

There is no doubt that DNA is a later invention and that initially there was only RNA. RNA has 2 main functions, it can be copied into another RNA molecule or it serves as a template for the synthesis of a protein molecule.

There is no doubt that the protein synthesis function has appeared later than the self-replication function. The reason is that if there would have ever existed an RNA molecule without self-replication that could be used for protein synthesis, it would have immediately disappeared without any descendants.

So the first nucleic acids were RNA molecules able to be replicated, but without any useful function. In other words, they were RNA viruses that were parasites of some self-replicating chemical systems which had metabolism, but which did not use nucleic acids.

The host systems must have been using ATP for a long time before the apparition of replicable RNA, and RNA must have appeared due to side reactions that caused losses of ATP by polymerization (ATP and related nucleotides are just monomers of RNA, i.e. its constituent blocks). ATP must have been used as a dehydrating agent to create peptide bonds long before the use of nucleic acids as templates for protein synthesis.

Even in the living beings of today there are many peptides that are created without being synthesized in ribosomes with RNA templates, but the mechanism of their synthesis is much less known and understood than the synthesis of proteins with RNA templates. Before nucleic acids, the catalysts of the biological reactions must have been such peptides, which used a much smaller set of amino acids than the proteins of today, perhaps only about 6, but certainly no more than 10.