New Scientist: Artificial life forms/digital versions getting smart?
New Scientist is really a lovely magazine, all told. Not that it’s always entirely a serious magazine – it seems to revel in irreverance and in the delight of reporting arcane news that can be made awfully exciting by overstressing one or two long-shot interpretations. This is just an impression, unbacked by statistics or deep thought, but from the current issue I might offer as examples of science-candy its entertaining story by David Shiga, Giant balloons could clear out space junk ; or Eugenie Samuel Reich‘s Is a cosmic chameleon driving galaxies apart? Lots of style points, very British and all, but these concern items that in this man’s opinion clearly have little chance of bearing fruit in reality.
THAT SAID – here’s one that got my imagination roaring and satisfied a few of my own biases:
- Catherine Brahic: Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence ;
- plus New Scientist editorial Digital evolution and the meaning of life ;
Artificial, digital life (as the editorial says) has been talked about for a long time, and reported likewise. But this is among the better jobs I’ve seen of making it seem real and alive. I’ve felt for a long time that if video games or other consumer products could show people how genetic algorithms, evolutionary computation, and similar things mimic exactly biological 
evolution, then evolution would stop being some abstraction of Darwinian biology semi-theological in nature and become an everyday experience. This story feeds my certainty (or hope) that such will occur.
One question. The story comes with illus – a moth-like sea monkey or something that is labeled as “artificial life from a digital sea.” What is that thing? Who made it? Did it evolve spontaneously in computers? How does it illustrate this story?
Grist for the Mill: Michigan St. University Digital Evolution Laboratory ;
- Charlie Petit
