First Replicating Creature spawned in Life Simulator

Found this article today, seems that self replicating digital life has been created in a program called the Game of Life?

Here is a blurb:

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 (see diagram). The "offspring" is identical to its parent, but it has shifted up and slightly to the left - another first for Life: every other known pattern moves along one of the eight compass points, but Gemini travels across the grid in a north by north-west direction.

www.newscientist.com...

Could this be the start of dangerous self aware AI? or is this something completely benign?

---GeminiSky

Intriguing.....
So this is a game, or is it an actual science experiment?
Seems appropriate you Gemini, would post this about the "creature" Gemini.

I am glad to see scientific games as this and Seed out there, allowing so many minds to exercise their creativity in bettering humanity with practical ideas and approaches. The games seem both entertaining and serious and could bring on some revolutionary new modalities to consider.

Beats the heck out of CandyLand and Sorry
There goes my age reference....

Peace

[edit on 26-6-2010 by speculativeoptimist]

reply to post by speculativeoptimist


It is a pure coincidence that the organism is named after my sign. It must mean that it is an intelligent, handsome, and articulate organism

Oh, how interesting! So, this program replicates itself based on instructions and sets of rules and, with a large amount of time, change? Quite amazing.

About this being a 'start' of self aware AI. Maybe! I don't think this could occur anytime soon, however, and if it did I would guess the humans creating such things would have some kind of word or action that would cause the self aware AI to 'shut down' in case it became dangerous.

Interesting article, I like their idea of using the tapes as what appears to be a set of instructions. With a sufficiently complex structure and specifically designed rules, you could use the game of life as a method of decoding and "executing" the game's "assembly language". And from there, you could move onwards into the more complex "languages". That's just speculation however. The whole thing kind of reminds me of a turing machine.

As for the article title, it is incorrect, as the first comment points out. This is most certainly not the first replicating "creature" to exist in the game of life. gliders do it, as do various other structures. Here's a wikipedia article explaining the game of life and the various structures which have been designed for it:

en.wikipedia.org...

Gemini is an interesting structure, but not particularly mind blowing. This isn't the start of a self-aware AI, it's just the game of life, I coded it in High school. All kinds of structures have existed for quite a while before gemini, though gemini is at least an interesting model to look at, if only because it moves in a different direction and uses the concept of these intruction "tapes", much like instruction memory in a computer.

Despite all this, a cellular automata computer has already been modelled, though I do not believe it functions in the same manner. This seems to be at best a new way to do something we could do for a while. Still pretty cool though.

But yeah, this is a "game" because it has rules (though no clear objective), but the game and cellular automata in general are valid areas of research/experimentation in computer science. You could search for it online and probably "play" an interactive version on the internet. It's kinda fun to mess around with.

However, no self aware AI will spawn from gemini.