Artificial Life.

The practical development

We all know God has created the life, but we do not know what for.

Now we want to be a God trying to create artificial life, but we do not know whole conception of creation to get real success.

For human beings the life looks like something mysterious because they/we are a part of the life. We cannot understand completely what we are, what is a goal of our existence and so on. We thing the only Got knows what we are down here for.

Actually the analogous problem coming up when we try to create an artificial life. Basically we do not know what for. We just trying to create something human-like because we think it must to be very simple stuff. We think we need just a body and something similar for brain. The mind is just a God’s sparkle.

Why we think that the creation of artificial man is something simple. We know from literature a number of sci-fi artificial persons, starting from Frankenshtein.

In fact before that horrible creature we know many examples of men were made from wood, iron and clay. Back to deep past we can recognize a set small gods-idols, which were completely alive and intelligence for ancient people. But the idols were silent and enigmatic. Thus the human beings transferred they own characters for the creatures. Who is always silent dispassionate and even immortal? It has to be very-very powerful creature – ancient god-idol.

Later we becomes smarter but not completely. We made up new unique God, but many things of our life come from our deep past. Mainly it is art – all paints and sculptures have origin from ancient attempts to create real man. People did not know a lot about life and how it works inside human body. The shape was a main criterion of object.

If looks like deer – it was deer. The nature did not invent an art and only sometimes people could not recognize from first glance if it is deer or only branches, it was bear or only brown rounded dome. It was a problem to take some time for taking decision – to charge in or to run out. The only accurate shape was a criterion of action. To recognize the ancient man was needed to get closer and closer… it was very scared.

Imagine the man is seen a modern sculpture of a bear with open eyes. I swear – he newer get closer than safe.

Thus the God’ sparkle is an ancient myth. It is just our human wrong suggestion that life-like ought to be alive.

I can prove it – remember the first tales of robots. There were made somewhere in bungalow from old car parts, old radio and were needed oil for joints and electricity to charge a battery of servomotors. The human-like appearance was absolutely sufficient the creature start to speak and behave as a real man was born by woman.

It is weird – we are all in the deep past.

I think we need to destroy the myth and try to understand clearly that to create a artificial man is… impossible. I am sorry.

Why?

It is because the man’s mind is a product of very long evolution of living systems and we are what we are because of our place in the world. We have in our brain a lot about our-self, starting from the very early ages as a baby, than all our growing, contacting with parents, friends, environment. All the information step-by-step creates our life, our mind.

As well the previous experience of number of past lives given to us by genes, DNA, books, stories of parents, grandparents and so on.

We are very-very social creatures. Suppose you were be born with square nose. It is absolutely nothing for essence of human being, but I swear – you would be now completely different person in your mind.

To be like real man the artificial creature ought to be embedded by human DNA, genes, be to born by woman… shortly be a man.

I remember that in previous decades people thought about cybernetics as about the science to create artificial slaves. Nobody was care about is it possible or not. But it was very serious discussing what to do with the new creatures, new citizens because there was no doubt they would be absolutely similar to men inside in their souls. It was very naïve, but it was. Later we had really breakthrough in term of AI – computers. It was absolutely unpredictable – sci-fi writers wrote of future as a lot of robots, which maintain one huge computer. Hmmm… computers now very powerful even personal very small and cheap. But we still are very far off robots. They still are ancient idols.

The frustrating point about human-like robots future makes us free to see new horizons.

Now we are facing in front of new paradigm – the generation of artificial life AL instead AI what is solid associates now to computers and neural network algorithms.

What is this?

Remember the Genetic Algorithms – there are behavior and pre-intelligence the numbers of simple creatures, which are filtering though out evolution. By now genetic algorithms are very powerful and promising to solve complicate tasks, which required high adaptation in real time.

I see a nearest future of AI+GA in their composition to get actual AL. We need to enhance the intelligence of each creature of GA as a person, but it shouldn’t go out off the being’s society.

New paradigm: Blue Puppy - Artificial life around us.

Overview.

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BP is something between AI and AL. Maybe we have to name it AP – artificial puppies or AC – artificial creatures. They are not really intelligent however they do what they need to do.

So, now the question: What the intelligence is needed for?

Answer: To be survive. The main goal of intelligence is to make optimal behavior in the changing world. It is sort of prognosis, but together with the creature – prediction taking to account it’s own behavior and the world reaction to the behavior.

It’s very complicate stuff. How the real creature does it?

The simplest schema of the prognosis needs some parts

:

1. Sensors: eyes, ears, skin sensitivity.

2. Long memory #1 to store patterns: patterns of enemies, food, valuable situations, so on.

3. Long Memory #1 to store actions: patterns of appropriate actions for any situation.

4. Pattern recognition system: from sensors any pattern of valuable object invoking from memory store - enemy or food or stone.

5. Estimation of current environment state. Internal model of own location.

6. Action choice system. To recall and appraise the best reaction to the situation. All this should be stored for immediate usage before it is needed.

7. Sleeping system: In very quiet state to recall all situation from previous life experience and try to find out best solution than it would. As well try to image close to that situation and different respond action.

8. Learning system: that system creates models for pattern recognition.

9. Criterions: food, enemies, breeding.

10. Emotion thresholds: horror, pleasure, love etc.

Draft scenario of being’s day.

In daytime it is looking for food, continuously taking into account environment and making internal 3D model of this as an avatar on a plane with simple-shaped objects – stones, tree trunks, brushes, hills. All these objects are static and do not look dangerous. The food is a grass. Creature needs to change its position continuously because the food is distributed on the surface.

The recognition system inputs information of nearest objects by its sensors, recognizes it and marks as non-dangerous. And eat, eat, eat.

Of course, its attention should be shared for eating, looking for best food, memorize its location and watching for enemies. It is exactly like in a herd – everybody from time to time arises its head and looking around.

One more feature should be – a random search. It is simplest way to get optimal point for food in complex world.

Assume somebody sees something moving – the recognize system estimates as far and as big the object is. There should be some threshold of danger – no attention for small far objects. However after some value of vector (distance, size, velocity) the behavior of being ought to be changed. It looks like multi-criterion task of evaluation goal function by three criterions given by the vector. Of course that function should be defined/calculated before event like that and be specifying whole being’s life.

While the object approaches the being’s multi-thread behavior changes priorities – the most important becomes the pattern of the object recognition. For this Sensors system collects information about object and Recognition system sweeps patterns from long memory, trying to get some coincidence. It looks like (pattern-value), (pattern-value), (pattern-value)… . The smaller values, the close pattern to real object.

Actually during the procedure we will get sometimes local minimums what are signals to particular/intermediate recognition: cloud->bush->cow->wolf!

The action comes when some vector (pattern, value, distance, danger, threshold) gives a signal to action function. It is also multi-criterion. The object can be recognized as a dog for 90% but the creature-cow won’t act till it gets very close. However 30% for far wolf figure is sufficient to run away.