Artificial life pioneer and ecologist Tom Ray is engineering a Net-based
"ecosystem" in the hope of catalyzing an explosive increase in the
complexity and diversity of wild digital organisms. Using CPU time donated
by users on the Net, Ray wants to launch an expanded version of his
celebrated Tierra program, in which simple digital organisms evolved into
complex communities of competitive and cooperative creatures.
"Because of its size, topological complexity, and dynamically changing
form and conditions," says Ray, "the global network of computers is the
ideal habitat for the evolution of complex digital organisms."
He plans to set up a "virtual Net" within the real one (so his creatures
can't escape and devour the computers they occupy), "inoculate" it with
his primitive organisms, and then step back and watch. As the digital
creatures compete for energy (CPU cycles) on the system, they'll evolve
more and more sophisticated mechanisms for seeking out places to
replicate. Succeed and reproduce; fail and perish. Eventually, Ray hopes,
"complex and beautiful creatures" will emerge.
Ray, who holds a PhD from Harvard University and has a background in
tropical forest ecology, has two main motivations. The first is to address
perhaps the most pressing and elusive question in evolutionary biology
today: How does evolution spontaneously generate enormous increases in
complexity?
But Ray also wants to create new software. Some of the complex and
creative organisms that evolve in the network, which Ray calls a "digital
reserve," will have useful qualities, though there is now no telling what
they'll be. It's a good bet they won't be accounting programs, though;
they'll likelier be fuzzy applications such as pattern recognition.
When the wild digital organisms begin displaying usable characteristics,
engineers will pull them out of the preserve and domesticate (breed and
neuter) them into saleable products. The organisms on the Net will be in
the public domain. Anyone willing to make the effort can observe and
attempt to domesticate them.
Now Ray has to get people on the Net to donate spare CPU cycles to the
project. As incentive, he's offering a tool that will let them observe the
activity at any node from any node. Donors can pluck digital organisms out
of the evolutionary soup and develop them into products. But, for most
donors, Ray hopes that a reverence for life -- and a chance to participate
in its next big leap -- will be incentive enough. Ask not only what a-life
can do for you, says Ray, but what you can do for a-life. Tom Ray: ray@santafe.edu.
