First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life 241
Calopteryx writes "New Scientist has a story on a self-replicating entity which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life. 'Dubbed Gemini, [Andrew Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape's length but, made up of two constructor arms and one "destructor," play a key role. Gemini's initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete. As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges, until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.'"
Nanites (Score:3, Funny)
They're coming to take over. Sure, of course there are only a few hundred at first...but then those become thousands, then millions, then billions. Soon, we will all be knee deep in this shit.
lolwut?
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And to take care of them we'll create nannites. :p
(or nanny-ites)
Re:Nanites (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nanites (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nanites (Score:5, Insightful)
A good thing, I say. Poverty will be eradicated, Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and everyone will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want. People will want to create new stuff, even lacking any normal incentive, simply out of boredom.
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"To get medical treatment, you would need money. "
No, you need something the doctor values. there is a big difference there. A doctor can replicate in car, boat, tv,, gold clubs whatever. Just like everyone else. So money, even the idea of money, looses its value.
OTOH, he may want services., or just do it because they like to help people.
Logically, this technology would mean that all physical items the doctor needs to treat people would be free. so his cost go down a lot.
Many service wouldn't be needed. foo
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Poverty will be eradicated
no, it will change because the definition of wealth will change.
Original work, labor, land. These will be the measure of wealth.
"Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and "
No, it will change to be used for people to by and sell shares of things that can't be duplicated.
Original art*, manual labor and so on. When you want landscape done, what do you use to motivate people to do the work for you? A sky scraper? Barter? Land?
"will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they
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Poverty will be eradicated
no, it will change because the definition of wealth will change.
Poverty is not about being wealthy. As Wikipedia puts it, "poverty means being unable to afford basic human needs". If the basic human needs are provided for everyone, regardless of the social structure that emerges afterward there will by definition be no poverty.
Why do you assume they won't be beholden to a landlord?
Because land outside of cities is very cheap, and will get even cheaper if the demand to use it for food production disappears. Since the main point of living in cities is not having to drive 3 hours to work, and work will no longer be a part of m
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A good thing, I say. Poverty will be eradicated, Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and everyone will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want. People will want to create new stuff, even lacking any normal incentive, simply out of boredom.
Unfortunately, history disagrees. The Samoan islands were a utopia; food was freely available by wading out into the bay and shelter was almost unnecessary due to the clement weather. So, everyone's favorite pastime was fucking and drowning the excess babies. Compare this to the Mediterranean, where earlier ecological collapse had ruined the farmlands and you needed walls to keep out hostile neighbors. The upper class'es favorite pastime? Natural philosophy.
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Even if Home Taping Is Killing Music(tm), there would be about a billion people being too busy having enough to eat for the first time in their lives to give a fuck. (Plus, of course, the "think of the poor artists" argument kind of breaks down when the artists are all sprawled out around their post-scarcity-cocaine-replicator, having a grand old time...)
Unless you
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Good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
If not being paid removes the incentive to create new products, then how do you explain Linux, or any other Free Software?
Not getting paid to do it means that products, entertainment, information, ideas
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Part of that reality is coming true...
http://hubpages.com/hub/This-affordable-3D-printer-can-print-itself [hubpages.com]
I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought someone had come up with a glider gun which created & shot out other glider guns... this was about 20 years ago from my memory...
Re:I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:5, Insightful)
And doesn't a glider do that?
Reading in between the lines of the article, it sounds like this thing manages to create the copy before the destruction of the original is complete, unlike a glider which is basically moving itself. But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.
Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.
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Agreed. Kind of like all of the commonly accepted scientific definition of "life" [wikipedia.org]. Requirements that lifeforms be made of cells or have a metabolism seem incredibly silly in face of the possibilities computation has presented us. The entire topic is wishy-washy and not terribly objective. People just make up th
Re:I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:4, Informative)
Check out the forum where it was posted: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 [conwaylife.com]
That's the game of life forum - Conway is the guy who invented it.
It may be a popular forum, but the domain conwaylife.com is not owned by Conway.
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Grandparent did not say Conway invented the domain name.
You're being disingenuous. By saying "Conway is the guy who invented it" in the same sentence as promoting a website that has conway in the domain name, I find it difficult to conclude that there wasn't meant to be an implied association between the two. This is especially true given that everyone already knows it's "Conway's Game of Life" (that's in the article title) and given that when you parse the sentence, "it" refers to the forum.
Re:I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I understand correctly, it creates two copies while self-destructing in the process. So it is, indeed, replicating.
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Now that's interesting.
When i first read the headline I was befuddled. The whole point of the game is that its structures replicate themselves and create other things all over the map.
But I don't recall ever seeing one that made multiple copies of itself, and then died.
Re:I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:4, Interesting)
If I understand correctly, it creates two copies while self-destructing in the process. So it is, indeed, replicating.
Now that's interesting.
When i first read the headline I was befuddled. The whole point of the game is that its structures replicate themselves and create other things all over the map.
But I don't recall ever seeing one that made multiple copies of itself, and then died.
This is a tricky point. The people who say that this new pattern is not ultimately different from a glider are correct, in a sense -- the Gemini spaceship is technically a spaceship, not a replicator.
It _does_ make two copies -- but the copies are of the two replicator units at the ends of the glider channels, not of the entire spaceship.
But replicator units replicating themselves, even with the help of an outside stream of instructions (which is then reflected on to the next newly-created copy of a replicator unit) are still something that hasn't been seen before in the Life universe. So this is a much more impressive technical accomplishment than, say, finding a new variety of spaceship using a search utility.
Gliders and spaceships "replicate" themselves in somewhat the same way that salt crystals or wildfires do -- that's just the way the universe works, you might say. But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.
The replicator units are like robots that include all the tools needed to make more robots exactly like themselves -- but they're radio-controlled and have no internal memory, so you have to pipe the actual construction recipe in from somewhere else. That means they're not self-contained self-replicators, true -- but they're a darn sight closer than a salt crystal or a glider!
Eventually someone will build a pattern with an internal memory that can hold a complete self-construction recipe -- but the Gemini is an important milestone along the way to that goal, and the first true Life replicator will probably contain ideas taken from the Gemini, just as the Gemini contains ideas and mechanisms from preceding patterns.
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But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.
how so?
I was hoping someone would ask that. Let me start out with a comparison to other cellular automata. Conway's Life is B3/S23 -- "born if 3 neighbors, survives if 2 or 3 neighbors". There are other rules, such as HighLife [wikipedia.org] (B36/S23, very close to Conway's Life) in which a 12-cell pattern can replicate itself -- after 12 generations there are 2 copies, after 36 ticks there are 4 copies, and so on. This pattern regularly evolves from random starting states.
There's even a rule, Fredkin's parity rule (B1357/
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That's what happened when I had my two kids.
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The article is a bit mystifying, but it does refer several times to the original "gemini" being destroyed while a single new one is created. It also seems to require the "tape" of glider "bits" coming into it to create the copy, which makes it even less "replicating" than a basic glider.
It's more like kicking a very big pattern across the screen than it is "self-replication". Gemini moves from one location to another far away, and it required a swift kick to get it there. In this case the kicking is prob
Re:I thought someone had a glider gun... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you're right. TFA is rather confusing on the precise nature of the thing, but the Gemini article [conwaylife.com] on LifeWiki explains what it actually is:
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That's a remarkably accurate and non-sensational description of what Gemini does. Thanks!
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Sort of like a vending machine that sells other vending machines?
With apologies to Mitch Hedberg (RIP)
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reprap?
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No, but it's mobile and runs completely on electricity, so it's an EV vehicle. It's got a CVT transmission and qualifies as a PZEV vehicle as well. I haven't seen the diagrams, but I assume it would run on DC current.
When it runs out of power, your SOL of luck, though. But only an astute /.dot reader would know about that if they RTFAed the article.
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Not exactly Conway's game of life, but similar concept, and it is certainly possible to encode this in Conway's game of life.
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You would need a glider gun that shoots out more glider guns.
Which would be hella fun, actually.
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You would need a glider gun that shoots out more glider guns.
Which would be hella fun, actually.
There is a breeder pattern that uses a set of ships to produce a stream of glider guns, but (being regular Gosper Glider Guns) they don't move once they've been created.
The applet on Paul Callahan's page [math.com] has it stored as one of the example patterns.
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That's an awesome pattern for sure. But to be a self-replicating pattern, the glider-gun breeder would need to breed glider-gun breeders. (did I get that right?)
I still can't tell from the comments if the pattern in the article is *actually* self-replicating, or if it just destroys itself while creating a single copy. If that's all it does, this doesn't sound any more remarkable than your basic glider, which also "replicates and destroys itself" as it moves across the screen.
What is actually more interes
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I wasn't offering the breeder pattern as an example of self-replication, just as an example of a "glider gun gun". As for Wade's pattern... Well, I've been running the simulation for over an hour and it's barely past generation 10M (and the actual replication isn't supposed to be complete until almost 40M). Perhaps the construction outpaces the destruction in such a way that we do have two full copies of the original pattern, eventually.
Wolfram did seem impressed by Wade's pattern; he just said that the int
At least we can kill it (Score:5, Funny)
Fortunately the glider gun is already discovered, so at least we have a means of killing this new self replicating entity. ;)
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Except gliders are the very fuel it uses to grow and replicate! We're DOOMED!
Most impressive and important pattern? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.
Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.
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I don't see whats impressive about it at all - but then again, I don't really see whats going on.
I mean, we've programmed robots that can build themselves if you give them the materials. I figured that was self replicating, and that was done a couple years ago.
So whats going on exactly thats impressive in this simulation?
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Then again, maybe the impressive thing is that there are people out there with enough time on their hands to run 34 million iterations of the Game of Life with enough different patterns to find this one.
Re:Most impressive and important pattern? (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.
Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.
Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.
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Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.
Or arguably, it means you understand both sides of the coin and are open to discussion. No weaseling required.
Re:Most impressive and important pattern? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article:
In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.
Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.
Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.
FUNNY! But at the same time, I think weasel words are critically important. Science should be based on weasel words: may, could, indicates, possibly, probably, likely. When you hear someone saying non-weasel words: is, will, shall, always -- you're either talking to God or to someone who talks to God. Mathematicians, for instance, which is why they can say that in base 10, two plus two IS four. But past that, I'm all for weasel words.
Re:Most impressive and important pattern? (Score:5, Funny)
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I've heard about the Turing machine pattern, do you have a link about the pattern that emulates the game itself?
I searched some but only found your comment and various crawler-spam "fact" sites that crawled a page briefly mentioning such a pattern exists. :P
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In case you missed the other person (falzer) who posted the link, the search term is "unit life cell", but the only page with an worthwhile detail I have seen is http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/patterns/unitcell/ucdesc.html [radicaleye.com]
However falzer's link of http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=P5760_unit_Life_cell [conwaylife.com] because it links to other interesting things.
One of those is Deep Cell which is a version of the pattern that simulates two independant life universes with a period of only 7680.
Another is the
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Wow. Thanks for the links!
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Re:Most impressive and important pattern? (Score:5, Informative)
Those are patterns in the game of life itself. The Turing Machine one is particularly impressive. It demonstrates that the game itself is a Turing-complete computation engine - the more complex version is a Universal Turing Machine, so you can encode any arbitrary algorithm on the 'tape' (a streak of cells that runs diagonally across the grid).
Given that it demonstrated the Turing completeness of the system, it's probably the most important pattern, as it shows that you can create a pattern with any algorithmic behaviour that you want. This includes providing a proof that the pattern discussed in TFA is possible, although not (of course) telling you how to create it. This pattern is interesting, but knowing that it's possible is more interesting than knowing exactly what it is.
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Not so amazing: I missed that and modded the guy up. Posting to undo.
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Well then, I stand corrected. (It ALWAYS hurts to say that, but...)
I didn't realise that a universal Turing machine had been implemented in Life. That is utterly cool, and in this context, the self-replicating pattern becomes a demonstration of the proof you point out.
I'd still say that the self-constructing pattern is in the top five, but maybe not #1 anymore.
Thanks for the education!
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Great! But does it run NetBSD?
Re:Most impressive and important pattern? (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about, non-existing? They both exist.
http://conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Universal_turing_machine [conwaylife.com]
http://conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Turing_machine [conwaylife.com]
http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=P5760_unit_Life_cell [conwaylife.com]
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Posting like a know-it-all without even the minimal attempt at verifying basic facts is a game everyone can play!
Not to be a killjoy but... (Score:2, Interesting)
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You mean like a human giving birth to another human and then dying off?
Re:Not to be a killjoy but... (Score:4, Interesting)
If every time one human was born, an identical human died, it would be like that.
Re:Not to be a killjoy but... (Score:5, Funny)
This is slashdot -- some people here think that's actually how it works, while many more think births are all faked by the government, and still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.
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still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.
The internet is for 'more openness in the early stages of the process'!
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still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.
The internet is for 'more openness in the early stages of the process'!
So that explains all the porn?
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Yes. Humans wouldn't be terribly interesting creatures if that's all they could do, would they? All we'd have in the world is 1 human, "Eve", who keeps dying after birthing a new Eve.
Now a human giving birth to *multiple* humans and then dying off? THAT is what makes life "life". I'm pretty sure this is the expected definition of self replication - an entity creating multiple copies of itself before dying. This gives us robust exponential growth. In the Eve scenario, as soon as any one Eve dies before
Displacement not Self-Replicating (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, and if you read the entry on LifeWiki [conwaylife.com] you would see they agree with you.
"It displaces itself by 5120 cells vertically and 1024 cells horizontally every 33,699,586 generations."
that's what the entire universe is: (Score:5, Interesting)
some alien 43 dimensional child's entry in the local science fair
"look: i've created self-replicating life based on a few simple rules!"
and the judge says: "but it's only 4 dimensions, and one of the dimensions is only one way. shoddy, very simplistic, not a good middle school level effort"
to which the alien's mom says: "don't worry honey, next year we'll put baking soda and vinegar in a paper mache cone and simulate a volcano!"
and the alien child says: "that's ok mom, i don't like science anymore, i want to be a ranch hand. bye bye, little universe critters, i always thought you were cute"
and then he pulls the plug on his simulation, and trillions of animal, plant, and human lives on earth and septillions of lives on the other inhabited planets cease to exist in a puff
Re:that's what the entire universe is: (Score:5, Funny)
Oh man, that just made me get uneasy there for a while. Fantastic piece of writing you have done! You really should consider building that skill up and start submitting manuscripts.
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Mod parent up (not troll). I thought it was a decent very tiny sci-fi story.
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Only scored thirty points too.
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For those who don't know about the Game of Life (Score:5, Informative)
The Game of Life is one of the first cellular automata discovered that had simple rules but complicated behavior. The rules very roughly mimic bacterial growth. One has an infinite lattice grid, and some starting set of cells on the grid are designated as alive (every cell on the grid is either alive or dead). Each new generation is made by the following four rules: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies. Any living cell with more than three live neighbors dies. Any living cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. Any dead cell with three live neighbors (exactly) becomes a live cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life [wikipedia.org]
The Game of Life is mathematically interesting because it can be shown to be Turing complete. That is, if you have a process that tells you whether any given starting configuration will eventually dieout then you can answer whether any given computer program will eventually halt. In general, there's a theorem known as the Turing Halting Theorem which says that no general procedure exists to do that for all programs.
Prior to the work in TFA, there were known configurations called "gliders" which could replicate themselves as they moved across the grid, but they only left the same number of copies. There were also configurations which could spawn gliders (called glider guns). However, no configuration that was actually self-replicating in the sense of spawning more copies of itself was known. This work by Andrew Wade shows how to make configurations that do self-replicate. His original announcement is at http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 [conwaylife.com] and the actual configuration can be found at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9e96aFfebqqZmY5NjBkYjctY2ViNi00NmJlLTgwZDAtNmU5OTQwYjc1OWQ0&hl=en&pli=1 [google.com] Thus, this very simply system is still showing itself to have surprising and interesting behavior 30 years after the fact.
Als
Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life (Score:5, Informative)
Turing-complete means that it is able to perform all of the functions of a universal Turing machine, not that it is able to solve the Turing halting problem; a Turing-complete language (or system) by definition is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system.
Google Docs is slashdotted... Alternate download (Score:2, Informative)
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Sorry, the operation could not be performed. Please try again later.
You've reached the bandwidth limit for viewing or downloading files that aren't in Google Docs format. Please try again later.
It's pretty bad when Google gets slashdotted!
WireWorld is more fun to play with. (Score:5, Interesting)
WireWorld on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
This flash-based wireworld app is listing prime numbers. [rezmason.net]
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Awesome!
I remember reading about this 20 years ago in (IIRC) Omni.. it was an introduction to circuitry (it used the rules as an example to demonstrate logic gates.) I didn't know it had a name, and while I always thought it would be a cool thing to code (now that I can) I'd never thought someone had actually done it... thanks for the links! :)
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Am I supposed to do anything but hit play on the prime number generator? It loads for me, and the counter in the corner of the screen goes up, but nothing happens.
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toggle overdrive (Score:3, Informative)
beside the rabbit is the radiation-looking thing. Toggle it and it runs 100x faster.
The number 2 pops out at around 11000 or so.
Is there a video? (Score:2)
The article has steps to reproduce this, but does anyone have a video or animated gif or something for those of us who are interested, but not this interested?
I just copied the text to illustrate the steps involved, for those unfamiliar with how articles work the article has more information along with the links.
How life on Earth began (Score:2)
What?
That sentence sounds like bullshit inserted to make the story appealing to people who aren't interested in the maths. Like the virus reference in the start. "Ooh, self-replicating; it's like DNA." It's the same thing that makes quantum physicists groan when the word "teleportation" is mentioned.
This is a fascinating pattern, but there is nothing magical, otherworldly or philosophical about it.
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Re:First! (Score:4, Funny)
Elf Replicating Ghost
Monsatan (Score:2)
It's the Monsanto strain.
It's the Monsatan satan.
Re:Monsatan (Score:5, Funny)
It's Hannah Montana.
OH GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!?
Kill it with fire, kill it with fire!
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Re:Third! (Score:5, Funny)
Self Replicating post! :-P :-P :-8
Self Replicating post!
Self Replicating post!
uh oh mutation...
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uh oh mutation...
That's evolution. :p
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Evolution is the preservation of beneficial traits
Wrong.
Evolution is the preservation of non-detrimental traits.
Re:Third! (Score:4, Interesting)
A better wording is perhaps that the enviromental viability of a geno and phenotype is what is the driving force behind evolution.
Re:Third! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Third! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Conway? (Score:4, Funny)
What, you never landed on the "you've had a baby, collect presents" block?
I suppose there wasn't a loop from selling the kids to having the kids go to "start".
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I thought people moved on from writing apps with that long ago ;)