The Day the Game Came Alive: Virtual Worlds and an Origin of Artificial Life Bruce Damer CIG2010 ITU Copenhagen Denmark August 18, 2010

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Question: Could this happen and if so how do you get there from here? Answer: We are going in that direction but it’s a long road. So lets look back at the short sixty year evolution of Artificial Life

1946 – Eniac, programming by plug board

Enter John von Neumann

Birth of the First True Digital Computer The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ - 1946

Von Neumann Architecture

Robert Oppenheimer John von Neumann Alan Richards photographer.  Courtesy of The Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA

The ECP: Compact, fast, stored program, world changing

ECP Program #3: Experiments in biometric evolution… 1953 report by Nils Als Baricelli

Baricelli “Blueprints”

Baricelli “Blueprints”

Punched Card Output Photo Captures first direct visual output of a program state (memory)

The world’s first Artificial Life program

Roll forward forty years to Tom Ray’s Tierra Me and Tom Ray, Burgess Shale, 1997 Tierra: the iconic genomic evolution system, early 1990s – overload the network

1996-97: Biota.org’s Nerve Garden SIGGRAPH Electric Garden, 1997 First generative online world, early experiences (overloaded again)

And Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures Early exemplar: Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures (1991-4) Evolving Virtual Creatures by Karl Sims Inspired a generation of Soft Alife developers in the 1990s-2000s

Karl Sims: Evolving Virtual Creatures

2000s - State of the art: “Soft” Artificial Life Early exemplar: Karl Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures (1991-4)

Avida self replicator

Challenge #1: ALife Engines are very different than Game Engines Numerically computationally heavy Graphically & interactionally heavy Vast numbers of objects and interactions in bounded space Limited number of objects in client spaces Long periods of uninteresting behavior punctuated by unpredictable jumps in complexity Continuous interesting things must happen for commercial success Low reliability, high novelty, challenging to understand Trustable guaranteed actions, presets, procedural or emergent behaviors “on demand”

Game Life is clocked to the Human experience Artificial Life is clocked to the “Nature” or “Physics” of its own reality So how to reconcile this?

Solution #1: Separate grids connecting engines

But can you “evolve” a good NPC given aggressive production schedules? Perhaps not…

But is this viable?

For a part of a game or a whole ALife game?

And built SPORE instead Will Wright said No And built SPORE instead

Challenge #2: Computing Nature (?) Can Von Neumann Do It? Sixty years later we are still living with the Von Neumann Bottleneck

Conventional vs Natural Computation Systemic Computer model by Peter J Conventional vs Natural Computation Systemic Computer model by Peter J. Bentley, UCL, Digital Biology Group

Non-living natural world supports a massive number of parallel interactions but they are finite, bounded

Living natural world supports infinitely repeatable computations in a massively parallel fashion

e-coli, a massively parallel computing universe David S e-coli, a massively parallel computing universe David S. Goodsell from The Machinery of Life

e-coli, a massively parallel computing universe

The complexity of Cytoplasm A cube 100nm on the side contains roughly: - 450 proteins - 30 ribosomes - 340 tRNA molecules - several mRNA molecules - 30,000 small organic molecules (amino acids, nucleotides, sugars, ATP etc) - 50,000 ions - remaining 70% is water - all in continuous interaction

But what does a Whole Cell look like? Harvard’s Inner Life of a Cell Roll tape! But what does a Whole Cell look like? Harvard’s Inner Life of a Cell Roll Tape!

Harvard’s Inner Life of a Cell

Model for a minimal cell

So can any kind of (Von Neumann) machine simulate a whole cell? Definitely not Low level approximations (overhead) How about a lot of these? Perhaps… for the equivalent of a small volume of aqueous chemicals, Anton: 1 microsecond per month

You need this…. to originate and evolve complex life (and civilization) Penny Boston, CONTACT Conference 2009, NASA Ames

So how to map this computer onto this one? Perhaps… …toil for a number of decades toward a most minimal type of “Singularity”, an Artificial Origin of Life

An “artificial origin of life” in cyberspace in this Century The EvoGrid An “artificial origin of life” in cyberspace in this Century

Roll tape! Enter the EvoGrid Roll Tape!

EvoGrid The Movie

EvoGrid early results

EvoGrid early results

EvoGrid early results

… but maybe one of you will rise to Challenge #2, the Origin of Artificial Life?

Closing Thought

Resources and Acknowledgements & Discussion Project EvoGrid at: http://www.evogrid.org Project Biota & Podcast at: http://www.biota.org DigitalSpace 3D simulations and all (open) source code at: http://www.digitalspace.com We would also like to thank NASA and many others for funding support for this work. Other acknowledgements include: Dr. Richard Gordon at the University of Manitoba, Tom Barbalet, DM3D Studios, Peter Newman, Ryan Norkus @ DigitalSpace, SMARTLab, Jeff Clune/PicBreeder, Peter Bentley, University College London, FLiNT, Exploring Life’s Origins Project, Scientific American Frontiers, DigiBarn Computer Museum, The Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA, and S. Gross.