"Artificial Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Ants don't have blueprints either. Ants have become the totem
animals of Artificial Life. Ants are so 'smart' that they have vastly
complex societies with actual *institutions* like slavery and and
agriculture and aphid husbandry. But an individual ant is a
profoundly stupid creature. Entomologists estimate that individual
ants have only fifteen to forty things that they can actually "do." But
if they do these things at the right time, to the right stimulus, and
change from doing one thing to another when the proper trigger
comes along, then ants as a group can work wonders.

There are anthills all over the world. They all work, but they're
all different; no two anthills are identical. That's because they're built
bottom-up and emergently. Anthills are built without any spark of
planning or intelligence. An ant may feel the vague instinctive need to
wall out the sunlight. It begins picking up bits of dirt and laying them
down at random. Other ants see the first ant at work and join in; this
is the A-Life principle known as "allelomimesis," imitating the others
(or rather not so much "imitating" them as falling mechanically into
the same instinctive pattern of behavior).

Sooner or later, a few bits of dirt happen to pile up together.
Now there's a wall. The ant wall-building sub-program kicks into
action. When the wall gets high enough, it's roofed over with dirt and
spit. Now there's a tunnel. Do it again and again and again, and the
structure can grow seven feet high, and be of such fantastic
complexity that to draw it on an architect's table would take years.
This emergent structure, "order out of chaos," "something out of
nothing" -- appears to be one of the basic "secrets of life."

These principles crop up again and again in the practice of life-
simulation. Predator-prey interactions. The effects of parasites and
viruses. Dynamics of population and evolution. These principles even
seem to apply to internal living processes, like plant growth and the
way a bug learns to walk. The list of applications for these principles
has gone on and on.

It's not hard to understand that many simple creatures, doing
simple actions that affect one another, can easily create a really big
mess. The thing that's *hard* to understand is that those same,
bottom-up, unplanned, "chaotic" actions can and do create living,
working, functional order and system and pattern. The process really
must be seen to be believed. And computers are the instruments that
have made us see it.

Most any computer will do. Oxford zoologist Richard
Dawkins has created a simple, popular Artificial Life program for
personal computers. It's called "The Blind Watchmaker," and
demonstrates the inherent power of Darwinian evolution to create
elaborate pattern and structure. The program accompanies Dr.