Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!limbo!taylor
From: KJ16@MARISTB.BITNET (Rajnish)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Evolutionary Software?
Message-ID: <477@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Date: 28 Feb 90 18:52:13 GMT
Sender: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com
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Approved: taylor@Limbo.Intuitive.Com

I was wondering what people thought of the Darwinian software being
created by the computer scientists at the University of California in
Los Angeles?  Their approach is pretty radical and they're creating more
powerful and reliable software through self-evolution than their
programmers can design by hand.

I guess these small modular programs they have going interact and merge
with each other to create new generations that can anticipate potential
pitfalls that human programmers can't.  Just like we humans think about
so many things at the same time in our head, the computer runs thousands
of programs simultaneously and a master program picks out the ones that
suits its' needs most efficiently, integrating it to produce following
generations that are even more powerful.  Survival of the fittest?

In Alameda and Orange Counties in California, an example of their
Darwinian programming is helping the county to control their mosquito
population.  Each of the individual program modules are able to
successfully mimic the behavior of the mosquitoes to determine growth
rate, etc., to find out precisely where and how much insecticide is
necessary to kill itself and its' children.  Instead of the previous
mass insecticide bombings at 20000 sites picked out by human programmers, 
this software is doing a near perfect job with only 3000 sites it picked 
out on its' own.  Pretty impressive, you think?

The computer scientist who developed this approach to software design,
Danny Hillis (Founder of Thinking Machines in Cambridge, Mass.) thinks
because of its constant evolution that his software is eventually going 
to make itself so complex that even their designers won't be able to
comprehend all of its' functions.  Kinda like becoming God?

This guy even has software working like a biological parasite to wipe
out incompetent programs and therefore forcing the master program to
search for programs that are even better!  This parasite even looks
around for viruses to kill.  Instead of taking the usual route, trying
to simulate human qualities like vision and speech, Hallis' artificial
intelligence is just trying to mimic unexpected behavior that all
organisms exhibit and using a parallel supercomputer to accelerate the
natural evolutionary process as defined by Darwin.

Interesting, you think?

Rajnish