G5BAIM Artificial Intelligence Methods

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G5BAIMArtificial Intelligence Methods

• Graham Kendall

Artificial Life
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A-Life

• Will we ever say
• We have created artificial Life

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A-Life

• Past philosophical debates
• Turing Test
• Chinese Room
• Will the next one be
• Can we play God and create life

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A-Life

• Assume we can create a-life
• Can we turn the computer off?
• Could we be charged with murder?
• If not, why do we think we have created life?

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A-Life

• What happens if a-life commits a crime?
• Can we turn it off?
• Is that capital punishment?
• Can we put it in prison?What would we expect by
  putting it in prison
• Punishment?
• Rehabilitation?
• Can we rehabilitate by re-programming - but is
  this genetic modification?

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A-Life

• 1990, a group of scientists discussed if a-life
  should be granted civil rights
• Would they ultimately demand civil rights

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A-Life

• The day will come when people have moral
  concerns regarding artificial life what are our
  obligations to the beings we create?
• Can we permit such beings to hurt and kill one
  another? We may have a moral problem in
  determining what actions we allow our artificial
  creatures to undertake. Perhaps we ultimately
  have to let our creatures be free to come to
  terms with themselves
• Heinz Pagels

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A-Life

• By the middle of this century, mankind has
  acquired the power to extinguish life on Earth.
• By the middle of next century, he will be able
  to create it. Of the two it is hard to say which
  places the largest responsibility on our
  shoulders
• Chris Langton

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A-Life

• Isaac Asimov first law of robotics states
• A robot may not injure a human being, or,
  through inaction, allow a human being to come to
  harm.

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A-Life

• A sensible approach?
• What if a robot learns?
• What if a mutation bypasses the routine that
  forces it to protect humans.
• What if the robot learns to protect itself is
  more important than anything else
• Ultimately kill a human in order to further its
  aims?

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A-Life

• UCLA biologist notes that Artificial life
  violates Asimovs First Law of Robotics by its
  very nature

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A-Life

• Okay - so what is a-life?
• Or, how will we recognise when we have created
  a-life?

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A-Life

• 1987, first a-life conference, New Mexico
• Within fifty to a hundred years a new class of
  organisms is likely to emerge. These organisms
  will be artificial in the sense that they will
  originally be designed by humans. However, they
  will reproduce, and evolve into something other
  than their original form they will be alive
  under any reasonable definition of the word
• James Doyne Farmer

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A-Life

• Is that a-life?
• Something that is designed by humans but is able
  to reproduce and turn into something other than
  its original form?
• You could write a program that is able to
  reproduce and turn itself into a form which
  differs from the original.
• You have created alife. Do you agree?

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A-Life

• A counter argument is that all we can do on a
  computer is simulate life
• We never actually create it. This is similar (if
  not the same) to the arguments about strong and
  weak AI.

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A-Life

• As far back as two thousand years ago, Aristotle
  said by possessing life implied that a thing can
  nourish itself and decay
• Does this mean that alife in a computer should
  provide the energy to power the computer?
• It is now almost universally accepted that
  self-reproduction is also a condition for life

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A-Life - Seminal Work

• John von Neumann
• Believed that biological organisms could be
  described using logic
• There is no randomness, no mysticism just one
  event following another in a deterministic manner
• In this way, biological organisms could be viewed
  as machines, in particular an automata

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A-Life - Seminal Work

• Try this
• Our brains have a finite number of neurons
• At any one instant our brain can in one state of
  the billions of possible states that are
  reachable by the neurons and connections
• The brain switches state when it receives an
  input
• Is this deterministic?
• If it is, then an FSM can replicate life!

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A-Life - Seminal Work - CAs

• Von Neumann - Lake/Creatures
• Ulam suggested that a-life could exist on a
  checkerboard type structure
• An FSM or CA - with the collection of cells being
  called an organism

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A-Life - Seminal Work - CAs

• von Neumann developed the first CA
• Each cell had twenty nine possible states
• von Neumann painted an organism on the grid.
  Essentially it was a body (a rectangle) and a
  tail
• He was trying to replicate the creature

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A-Life - Seminal Work - CAs

• The organism was complex
• He developed it so that the reproduction
  instructions were contained in the tail of the
  animal
• A further challenge was to ensure that any
  offspring were capable of reproduction and were
  not sterile or had been fatally mutated which may
  not show itself for a number of generations

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A-Life - Seminal Work - CAs

• John Conway - Game of Life
• Two states
• Simple Rules
• Proved to be a Turing Machine

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A-Life - Seminal Work - CAs

• Craig Reynolds - Boids
• Emergent Behaviour
• Non-Programmed Behaviour
• Follow Simple Rules
• Use Local Information

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A-Life - Seminal Work - CAs

• Will we ever create a-life?
• How will we know?
• How will we treat it?
• Finally - are any of these a-life?

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Your guess is as good as mine!!!!
Good luck in the exam
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G5BAIMArtificial Intelligence Methods

• Graham Kendall

End of Artificial Life