Trees eyes and antlers - Sometimes, very different organisms can end up having traits in common, even though they didn’t share those traits with an ancestor. Instead, different systems, solving similar problems, can come up with similar answers. -

Does a long life really inhibit evolution? - In episode 139 and 142, I talked about some results I’ve been getting with my experiment with artificial life and digital organisms. I had to rework the death object to make sure that one of the little crit...

Emergent self-replicating software from my experiments - In the previous episode, I provided a description of “Amoeba.” In this episode I use “Figures,” which is my own experiment with digital organisms and artificial life,

Emergent self-replication with Amoeba - Did life come from chaos? If it did, could you get artificial life to do the same thing? As I’m repeating the experiment, with some difference, I thought I’d talk about Amoeba—an artificial life simulation that ...

A closer look at results from ep 139 - In episode 139, I talked about unexpected results from my experiment with artificial life and digital organisms. There was a tiny bit of evolution happening with a very tiny population. Today,

The largest of the small - Not every single-celled life form is microscopic. Some of them can be seen with the naked eye. Some of them are, at least compared to other single-celled creatures, downright gigantic. -

An exception to the rules of biology - As soon as you’ve defined something like Eukaryotes, some exception crops up, and you have to redefine a classification of life. Today, we look at one or two such exceptions,

de facto fitness functions and unexpected early evolution - When people talk about their artificial life computer simulations, they often say that there is no fitness function—no bit of code that decides which bit of software lives, dies,

Figures0.2 - While researching for these episodes, I’ve also been researching for other reasons, including the experiment which I talk about today. It’s my attempt to use artificial life for artificial intelligence. - Here’s a link to episode 103,

What a blind man sees in his dreams - @seeingwithsound asked me if my lucid dreams are visual, and if so, how vivid or realistic are the experiences. The answer is somewhat interesting, so I went ahead and made an episode out of it. -