Evolving, self-replicating robots are here — but don’t worry about an uprising
Welcome to the EvoSphere
Mimicking evolutionary processes through software is a concept that has been explored at least as far back as the 1940s, the same decade in which ENIAC, a 32-ton colossus that was the world’s first programmable, general-purpose electronic digital computer, was fired up for the first time. In the latter years of that decade, the mathematician John von Neumann suggested that an artificial machine might be built that was able to self-replicate — meaning that it would create copies of itself, which could then create more copies.
Von Neumann’s concept, which predated artificial intelligence by more than half a decade, was revolutionary. It sparked interest in the field that has come to be known as Artificial Life, or ALife, a combination of computer science and biochemistry that attempts to simulate natural life and evolution through the use of computer simulations....
