Related papers: Darwin Turing Dawkins: Building a General Theory o…
There is much to learn from what Turing hastily dismissed as Lady Lovelace s objection. Digital computers can indeed surprise us. Just like a piece of art, algorithms can be designed in such a way as to lead us to question our understanding…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
We explore the commonalities between methods for assuring the security of computer systems (cybersecurity) and the mechanisms that have evolved through natural selection to protect vertebrates against pathogens, and how insights derived…
Darwin claims in the {\em Origin} that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are "almost valueless" as evidence. This claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we…
Intelligence necessitates memory. Without memory, humans fail to perform various nontrivial tasks such as reading novels, playing games or solving maths. As the ultimate goal of machine learning is to derive intelligent systems that learn…
Since the time of Darwin, scientists have struggled to reconcile the evolution of biological forms in a universe determined by fixed laws. These laws underpin the origin of life, evolution, human culture and technology, as set by the…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
Real-world generalization, e.g., deciding to approach a never-seen-before animal, relies on contextual information as well as previous experiences. Such a seemingly easy behavioral choice requires the interplay of multiple neural…
How mutations accumulate in genomes is the central question of molecular evolution theories, however our understanding of this process is far from complete. Drake's rule is a notoriously universal property of genomes from microbes to…
Evolution by natural selection can be seen an algorithm for generating creative solutions to difficult problems. More precisely, evolution by natural selection is a class of algorithms that share a set of properties. The question we address…
While evolution has inspired algorithmic methods of heuristic optimisation, little has been done in the way of using concepts of computation to advance our understanding of salient aspects of biological phenomena. We argue that under…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
We explore the connection between evolution and large-deviation theory. To do so, we study evolutionary dynamics in which individuals experience mutations, reproduction, and selection using variants of the Moran model. We show that, in the…
According to the Baldwin Effect learning can guide evolution. This does not suppose that information about what has been learned is transferred back into the genetic code: in the Baldwin Effect complex multi-gene characteristics are…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…
"Evolution behaves like a tinkerer" (Francois Jacob, Science, 1977). Software systems provide a unique opportunity to understand biological processes using concepts from network theory. The Debian GNU/Linux operating system allows us to…
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…
Artificial Intelligence is now recognized as a general-purpose technology with ample impact on human life. This work aims at understanding the evolution of AI and, in particular Machine learning, from the perspective of researchers'…
The Turing test may or may not be a valid test of machine intelligence. But in an age of generative AI, the test describes the positions we humans occupy. Judging whether or not something is human or machine produced is an everyday…