Artificial life is an old dream of people, but the research has only with considerations John von Neumanns. In the course of space travel, he designed the model of a cellular machine that became a role model for further development. Some indications of the story of the KL gives Florian Rotzer.
While it has become the project of artificial intelligence of silent, another fascination has spread. Cyberspace attracts and scares the entrance into the data room, in the virtual worlds, which you can now see not only on a screen, but in which you can go into the mirror with his body like Alice in the mirror. But already a new research direction in connection with the computer comes up, but actually challenging is as the simulation of the cognition and the perception world. Despised by the Ki-Patabsten long, begins for a few years – parallel to the theory of neuronal Darwinism in brain research – the scoop of artificial life to moult. She does not “above” in the simulation of the evolutionary historical spade cognition, in the manipulation of symbols and in the construction of complicated control systems, but it goes from “below” out, d.H. From simple, coincidence and principle of self-organization. The first successes of this strategy can be seen that the parallel computers and the so-called neuronal networks, with whom one believes that they believe promising to come to the cognitive, come from the approach of this research direction. Thus, for example, William Daniel Hillis, one of the pioneers of artificial life, developed the so-called combat machine, a very fast computer where over 60000 processors work in parallel. In addition to genetic engineering, stimulation of neurons and cerebral transplantation, a further taboo is torn: the degree of new forms of life in the ocological niches of the digital memory seems to have been possible.
A for many unpleasant, for some pleasantly exciting light of this artificial life has already detected in very reduced form some computers, which are populated by the so-called computer viruses and occasionally paralyzed. In the artificial, but further expanding biotope of networking computers spread out and reproduce themselves. You may not be waiting for a long time that such computer viruses will soon be produced, which exist in mutants and thus encounter attacks of the owners by changing their information chains. Then the race between parasites and hosts became a similar momentum, as it happens in nature. Here, too, life has developed from simple living things and the microorganisms are still more than 90% of the organisms. Biologists suspect that the DNS life from sound, ie a silicon-containing compound, by a “genetic power” developed. Today, we may be at the beginning of another power of power in which the DNS life can be allowed again a life in silicon and maybe at some point could be solved by him. But similar as with interventions in the biological code, the consequences can not be predicted in the manipulation of the digital codes of artificial life. Where evolutionary processes, ie learning events, whether in the artificial or biological life, use, developments become complex and withdraw in the long term control.