Berlin Brown and Software Development

Introduction   This blog entry describes an artificial chemistry simulation implemented through a cellular automaton. We show that basic rules can be used to produce complex behavior through simulated artificial chemical reactions. The chemical simulation exists on a fixed size two dimensional grid of cells.  Each active cell is represented by an artificial atom element, these atoms may collide with other atoms to produce a chemical reaction.  Strong chemical bonds will form if the chemical reaction is allowed by system.  Clusters of strong bonded atoms form molecule strings.   We show that self replicating molecule string patterns emerge from the artificial simulation.  This analysis is based on Timothy Hutton's artificial chemistry model from Squirm3.  It it is a basic model but a necessary step for analyzing and recreating similar natural systems.  Self-replication and self-organization is fundamental to all biological life. ...

Overview The field of artificial intelligence in computer science focuses on many different areas of computing from computer vision to natural language processing. These top-down approaches typically concentrate on human behavior or other animal functions. In this article we look at a bottom-up approach to artificial life and how emergent cell behavior can produce interesting results. With this bottom-up alife approach, we are not interested in solving any particular task, but we are interested in observing the adaptive nature of the entities in our simulation. We also wanted to introduce those more familiar with software engineering to biological systems and evolutionary theory concepts. Life is all around us. Even with inorganic material it is possible that microscopic organisms are covering that surface. Moving forward if we want to study, analyze and work with artificial agents, we might consider systems that have evolved behavior over a series of steps. We shoul...

Overview - Playing the Game Of Life When most computer users upload a profile image from their desktop to Facebook's website they don't stop to think about the simple binary math rules that are fundamental to most digital devices. We realize that 4 gigabytes of RAM is more memory than 512 megabytes but we don't visualize the logic chips that are involved in an xor $0x100, eax operation for a 32-bit CISC processor. Software developers have to consider memory management or how a computer's operating system loads their programs into memory. They don't normally consider VHDL logic circuit designs, the data paths, arithmetic logic units or the millions of transistors that make up a modern CPU. Those low-level details have been intentionally hidden from the user application developer. The modern CPU may have changed dramatically over the last decade but at the heart of early digital computing were simple Boolean operations. These simple rules were combined togeth...