The more I study nature and biology, the more I see that anthropomorphism gets in the way of understanding animals as well. Certain birds, cats, dogs, and even rodents are intelligent, but thinking of their intelligence merely as inferior to humans is not the whole story. Different forms of intelligence have to be understood on their own terms — not through starting with an archetype of human intelligence and making incremental modifications to that archetype. That sort of thinking can lead to anchoring.
For a while I’ve been trying to figure out how to resolve the Fermi Paradox. For those of you who don’t know, the Paradox is, given what we know about life, the universe and everything, there should be a significant number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. The reasoning here boils down to the Drake equation (a Fermi problem), which lets us get a ballpark estimate of how many extraterrestrials are out there. From wikipedia:
I use Google Reader a lot, and recently a “popular item” showed up on my reading list regarding how to resist the temptations of Satan. I poked into it just enough to get bored and start scrolling through the article until I saw this image:
I don’t know why I named it “Tide Pool”; there aren’t any tides. Oddly enough though, the creatures learn to move as if there were.
Yesterday I decided to play with some genetic programming. Though I found a neat GP resource, I decided to work from scratch and build a simulated tide-pool with algae/plants and animals of indeterminate form. Truth be told, I’m not even sure what I did really “counts” as genetic programming because the only evolved feature is the behavior for the animals. Regardless, I wrote the thing in a single day and got some neat emergent behavior and a screen-saver-wannabe. Green dots are “plants” and yellow/white/red/black are “animals”.
