Re: Optimal diversification in Avida

Joe Felsenstein <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:

> It's stimulating, yes. But the problem with systems like Avida is that they
> are not simple enough to do any theory on them. And without that, one
> can mess with them, find strange results, and then not know what features
> of Avida were responsible for those results, and thus not know to what other
> kinds of systems those results apply.
>
> I once attended an Artificial Life meeting at the Santa Fe Institute. It
> was fun and the people were nice, but they kept presenting these complicated
> evolutionary simulations that did strange things and then standing back and
> saying "isn't that stimulating?". And it was, but there was not a shred of
> theory that could be done on those systems (this was pre-Avida, in the
> era of Tom Ray and his system Tierra, but the point still holds).
>
> So when you see one of these simulations do This or That,
> you don't really know whether real organisms would do the
> same for the same reason, since you can't figure out
> exactly why any of these things happened.
>
> So we need technology, yes, but until it is connected with
> theory it won't deliver the goods.

One of the common reasons given for studying Artifical Life
models is that - if we confine our attention to real
biology, we are only seeing one "implementation of living
systems - the immediate descendants of the last common ancestor.

If biology is the study of life, simply studying one type of
organisms and its descendants represents a rather myopic
perspective.

Computer simulations provide implementations of life-at-it-
could-be, broading the perspective of the biologist beyond
the particular instance of living organisms that happen to
exist on this planet.

That throws light indirectly on life as it actually is, and
gives us a better, broader perspective on our own biology -
rather like visiting foreign countries can put ones own
culture into the proper perspective.

Theoretical analysis of the systems would be nice - but it's
not the point of building the models, and it's not necessary
to appreciate their virtues.

I completely buy into all these ideas.
--
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