Free The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

life-forms called Network Tierra designed by Thomas Ray, a biologist and rain forest expert. 4 Ray’s “creatures” are software simulations of organisms in which each “cell” has its own DNA-like genetic code. The organisms compete with each other for the limited simulated space and energy resources of their simulated environment.
    A unique aspect of this artificial world is that the creatures have free rein of 150 computers on the Internet, like “islands in an archipelago” according to Ray. One of the goals of this research is to understand how the explosion of diverse body plans that occurred on Earth during the Cambrian period some 570 million years ago was possible. “To watch evolution unfold is a thrill,” Ray exclaimed as he watched his creatures evolve from unspecialized single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms with at least modest increases in diversity. Ray has reportedly identified the equivalent of parasites, immunities, and crude social interaction. One of the acknowledged limitations in Ray’s simulation is a lack of complexity in his simulated environment. One insight of this research is the need for a suitably chaotic environment as a key resource needed to push evolution along, a resource in ample supply in the real world.
    A practical application of evolution is the area of evolutionary algorithms, in which millions of evolving computer programs compete with one another in a simulated evolutionary process, thereby harnessing the inherent intelligence of evolution to solve real-world problems. Since the intelligence of evolution is weak, we focus and amplify it the same way a lens concentrates the sparse rays of the sun. We’ll talk more about this powerful approach to software design in chapter 4, “A New Form of Intelligence on Earth.”

The Intelligence Quotient of Evolution
     
    Let us first praise evolution. It has created a plethora of designs of indescribable beauty complexity, and elegance, not to mention effectiveness. Indeed, some theories of aesthetics define beauty as the degree of success in emulating the natural beauty that evolution has created. It created human beings with their intelligent human brains, beings smart enough to create their own intelligent technology.
    Its intelligence seems vast. Or is it? It has one deficiency—evolution is very slow. While it is true that it has created some remarkable designs, it has taken an extremely long period of time to do so. It took eons for the process to get started, and, for the evolution of life-forms, eons meant billions of years. Our human forebears also took eons to get started in their creation of technology, but for us eons meant only tens of thousands of years, a distinct improvement.
    Is the length of time required to solve a problem or create an intelligent design relevant to an evaluation of intelligence? The authors of our human intelligence-quotient tests seem to think so, which is why most IQ tests are timed. We regard solving a problem in a few seconds better than solving it in a few hours or years. Periodically, the timed aspect of IQ tests gives rise to controversy, but it shouldn’t. The speed of an intelligent process is a valid aspect of its evaluation. If a large, hunched, catlike animal perched on a tree limb suddenly appears out of my left cornea, designing an evasive tactic in a second or two is preferable to pondering the challenge for a few hours. If your boss asks you to design a marketing program, she probably doesn’t want to wait a hundred years. Viking Penguin wanted this book delivered before the end of the second, not the third, millennium. 5
    Evolution has achieved an extraordinary record of design, yet has taken an extraordinarily long period of time to do so. If we factor its achievements by its ponderous pace, I believe we need to conclude that its intelligence quotient is only infinitesimally greater than zero. An IQ of only slightly greater than zero (defining truly arbitrary