Artificial life conference, Paris.

Next week it’s the European Artificial Life Conference (ECAL) 2011 in Paris.

Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary undertaking that investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of biological entities and processes. It also attempts to design and build artificial systems that display properties of organisms, or societies of organisms, out of abiotic or virtual parts.

ECAL, the European Conference on Artificial Life, is a biennial event that alternates with the US-based Alife conference series.

Download the complete PDF program booklet (53-page, includes all the abstracts)



I borrow this!

So what is life?

Posted by STEEN RASMUSSEN 5.8. on steennewmexico

This question, of course, has to be addressed, if you want to create life from scratch. At our FLinT center in Denmark we study and implement life-like and minimal living processes in a variety of materials and systems. In particular we seek to assemble a minimal protocell, a minimal physicochemically based cell.

First a little history:

Von Neumann, the inventor of the modern computer, realized that if life is a physical process, it should be possible to implement life in other media than biochemistry. He was one of the first to propose the possibility of implementing genuine living processes in computers, robots and other media. This perspective, while still controversial, is rapidly gaining momentum in many science and engineering communities and it is the basis for our work. Ilya Prigogine reemphasized and clarified the importance of utilizing free energy fluxes to generate order in physicochemical systems through self-organization. The metabolic processes in our protocells utilize free energy to maintain local order. Our metabolism is a thermodynamic engine that locally drives our system away from equilibrium. Manfred Eigen pointed out that autocatalysis between functional physicochemical components could be a mechanism for the emergence of early life and that autocatalysis can enhance a systems ability to maintain information. All our protocellular components are autocatalytically coupled.

Now, what is minimal physicochemical life then?

There is not a generally agreed upon definition of life within the scientific community, as there is a grey zone of interesting processes between nonliving and living matter. Our work on assembling minimal physicochemical life is based on implementing systems that meets three criteria, which most modern biological life forms satisfy.

In my opinion, and from a practical point of view, a minimal living physicochemical system needs to:

1. use free energy to convert resources from the environment into building blocks so that it can grow and reproduce,
2. have the growth and division processes at least partly controlled by inheritable information, and
3. allow the inheritable information to change slightly from one generation to the next, thereby permitting variation of the growth and division processes and thus allow selection and hence evolution.

How difficult can that be? Implementing these three simple criteria?

Well, I’m telling you, it’s not easy. It’s very complicated, as it takes many components to fall into place at the same time, and these components are not only of scientific nature.

For me personally, it took many years to convince any funding agency (peer review committee), that this kind of work is even possible. Secondly, we had to convince the committees that this work is worthy to spent tax payers money on: “In which sense will assembling minimal life benefit society?” Very important question, which I’ll get back to in some later blog. Only very few funding agencies give you money for basic, or curiosity driven, science.

I’ll say, getting continued funding for our activities is still, and has been, the hardest part of creating life. It’s certainly more complex than doing the science.

Secondly, due to the necessary complexities of the involved physicochemical systems, this kind of science is not a one-man activity. It takes a small village of skilled scientists from different disciplines, which gets us back to the previous point about money, as well as being able to host an exciting research environment.

Finally, and of course most importantly, it takes human wondering and amazement about why things are the way they are, as well as the courage to dream about how things could be. And it takes very good people. Without good people nothing moves. And then it takes tenacity. A dedicated effort day after day (and sometimes nights), month after month, year after year.

So don’t become a scientist unless you can’t help it. It consumes too much of you. But if you can’t help it, playing with your imagination and dreaming up new stuff, I believe is one of the most exhilarating things you can do as a human being. However, fundraising, writing grants, doing budgets, paying bills, dealing with whatever organization you are a part of, managing very smart people (herding cats), teaching, correcting exams, etc., is exhausting and can take some of the fun out of it. But that’s how it is. There are no free lunch.

On biosignatures, digital life and ETs.

A biosignature common to both life on Earth and digital life that would give hint of how alien life would look like? Life would leave an indelible stamp on the chemical make up, suggested Lovelock. The processes of life would create a fog of chemicals unlike anything that could form in an ordinary chemical equilibrium.

Life changes its surroundings. The atmosphere and the life it supported would form a kind of self-regulating system that could itself be thought of as a living organism-the Gaia hypothesis. Life maximize the fi tness, and adaption.

We have no ETs but we could look at evolution? Biosignatures ought to be present in any system that has evolved, also digital life in Si.

Dorn et co looked in various samples at the distribution of biomolecules, such as amino and carboxylic acids. They compared terrestrial sludge, which is obviously teeming with life, with the outcome of experiments to synthesise amino acids, which have no life. And they even looked at the composition of meteorites.

Their results are interesting. They found that the distribution of biomolecules in the absence of life generally reflects the thermodynamic cost of making them. So there are far more simple amino acids than complex ones, for example.

However, samples containing life do not follow this pattern. Where complex biomolecules play a role in the processes of life, and therefore confer some kind of advantage, they are much more common than can be explained by thermodynamic arguments.

Concentrations of related monomers in abiotic samples tend to exhibit specfii c patterns dominated by small, easily formed, low-formation-energy molecules, governed by reaction kinetics and thermodynamics. Organisms, on the other hand, contain catalysts (e.g., in terrestrial biota, enzymes) and expend energy to synthesize speci fically those molecules they need for survival and competition. In the presence of life, therefore, some speci fic complex and high-formation-energy molecules are synthesized rapidly because they convey a fitness bene fit.


Artificial 'Life'.
They did a similar analysis on a system of artificial life called Avida. In this world, the building blocks of life are elements of computer code that carry out simple instructions. Connect several instructions together and you have a complex "molecule". If these molecules have a code that allows them to copy, they can reproduce. Environmental factors such as the rate of mutation are controlled externally by computer scientists who also inject a constant stream of code that organisms can consume as they evolve.

The same kind of stamp on their environment was found. Certain bits of code are preferentially selected so that they are far more common in an evolved system - the "monomer abundance distribution biosignature", common in all evolved living systems? A universal biosignature of evolution - an evosignature.

While evolution undoubtedly plays a crucial role in the development of life, it also plays an important role in other processes as computer simulations. The signature should be unique. This discussion highlights is the difficulty in defining life in the first place.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1101.1013: Monomer Abundance Distribution Patterns as a Universal Biosignature: Examples from Terrestrial and Digital Life.


What is competition?
This say that the complexity is advantageous. In what way?
Complexity is seen in high-molecular complexes and use of energy, made easier by enzymes (dipoles?). What does this statement contain?

Complexity means differentation. More molecules mean more information and a more unik 'stamp' or Self. Self is a dissipative structure that can percieve (react on changes) externally and internally. So differentation creates a barrier, or Self, as a signature. This is made against the kinetics and termodynamics, as a self-organization. This needs a feed of external energy.

1. So this is another way to say Life is out of equilibrium systems.
2. Creation of barriers and Selves increase the collection of information and adaption. This is maximation of the negentropy.
3. Adaption = stress reduction. This disturbation of thermodynamics is allowed to cost, but minimally. The least action principle for the Self may be prevalent.
4. Action can be the difference between kinetic and potential energy as some kind of function of mass x time. The principle of Least action, responsible for choosing one of a number of possible solutions. The optimal solution corresponds to minimum variations of its external kinetic energy, translational velocity and time, provides realization of principle of Least action. This is resonance? Variations in the resonance is minimized. These oscillations require virtual or dark matter?
5. Living systems have a reaction, an output, of positive or negative energy, that regulates the energy consumption.
6. The environment is unstable, and it helps creating variations in the complexes. Evolution generates variation as an insurance against unstable conditions. Epigenetic changes that inject an Heisenberg Uncertainty into genetics. Methylational variation. A kind of built-in randomness generator that creates greater phenotypic diversity. Stability = rationals?

At conditions, when q = 1, the external translational velocity of particle is zero (zero-point oscillations). This is optimal.
The second law of thermodynamics also means decreasing of kinetic energy, and diminish the energy difference. That's why Nature works against it and creates negentropy, but at the same time increase its effects too. The second law doesn't rule biology at every time scale.

Consequently, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as well as Principle of Least Action, can be a consequence of minimized variations in resonance. Forced resonance creates a regulating force that do the synchronization.

In TGD (I quote) one must distinguish between two kinds of self organizations corresponding to the entropic bound state entanglement and negentropic entanglement. Biological self-organization could be therefore fundamentally di erent from the non-biological one. The succes of the p-adic mass calculations suggest that even elementary particles live in the intersection of real and p-adic worlds so that one should be very cautious in making strong conclusions. Certainly the intentional, goal-directed behavior of the system in some time scale is a signature of negentropic self-organization.

p-Adic length scale hypothesis could be understood as a resonance in frequency domain - most naturally for massless particles like photons. The secondary p-adic time scale for favored p-adic primes must be as near as possible to the proper time distance between the tips of CD (self and subselves). Mersenne primes satisfy this condition. Also log(p) is in this case as near as possible to log(2n) and in the sense that the unit of negentropy is maximized. This argument might work also for Gaussian Mersennes if one restricts the consideration to Gaussian primes.

This would give windows of action or interference with the quantum world. These windows are determined by rational/algebraic constraints. The fundamental biorhytm as p-adic/algebraic oscillation (incl. Golden Mean) means a direct connection between life and death, = interference/stability.

Evolution is present already at elementary particle level? This is the case if elementary particles reside in the intersection of real and p-adic worlds (dissipation and resonance?). The success of p-adic mass calculations and the identi fication of p-adic physics as physics of cognition indeed forces this interpretation. In particular, one can understand p-adic length scale hypothesis as reflecting the survival of the cognitively fittest p-adic topologies (= windows).

Kaivarainen has his window in the energy gap created in bivacuum between virtual and real world. Pitkänen has the Zero Energy Ontology as a similar creation. In both the important signal comes from the virtual/dark side.

Antimatter as the muon antineutrino is the predominant mass- quite counterintuitively. Could it be so?

Wonderful world!