maandag, augustus 21, 2006
maandag, augustus 14, 2006
donderdag, augustus 10, 2006
woensdag, augustus 09, 2006
woensdag, augustus 02, 2006

"The 80-byte copied itself into more 80-bytes. These 80-bytes proto-AI cell-things would have quickly filled their virtual universe, . . . but Tom Ray gave each 80-byte a date tag, gave them age in other words, and programmed in an executioner that he called the Reaper. The Reaper wandered through this virtual universe and harvested old 80-byte critters and nonviable mutants.

"The earliest AIs were dumb as dirt. Or perhaps the better metaphor would be that they were as dumb as early cellular life that was in the dirt. Some of the earliest hypercritters floating in the warm medium of the datasphere--which was also evolving--were 80-byte organisms inserted into a block of RAM in a virtual computer--a computer simulated by a computer. One of the first humans to release such creatures into the datasphere ocean was name Tom Ray and he was not an AI expert or computer programmer or cyberpunk, which they called hackers then--but was a biologist, an insect collect, botanist, and bird-watcher, and somone who had spent years collecting ants in the jungle for a pre-Hegira scientist name E.O. Wilson. . . .The cyberpunks said that evolving and mutating code sequences happened all the time in computers--they were calle bugs and screwed-up programs. They said that if his code sequences evolved into something else they would almost certainly be nonfunctional, nonviable, as most mutations are, and would just foul up the operation of the computer software. So Tom Ray created a virtual computer--a simulated computer within his real computer--for his code-sequenced creations. And then he created an actual 80-byte code-sequence creature that could reproduce, die, and evolve inhis computer-within-computer.