Evolution "Doesn't Need" Mutation - Blaise Agüera y Arcas

After a few million interactions, magic happens, which is that you go from noise to programs. You start to see, complex programs appear on these tapes. This is the most exciting plot that I've made in the last few years, and it's the one that's on the cover of the book. You can see that in the beginning, it's not very computational, and then a sudden transition takes place here. It looks like a phase transition. This is the book that I hear is making the rounds at Sakana, which I'm very happy to to hear. The big one on the right, What is Intelligence, is sort of the Lord of the Rings. And What is Life, on the left, is kind of the Hobbit. So it's kind of the single, and it's also chapter one of of What is Intelligence. So it goes kind of inside the other one. Mostly what I'll be talking about today is is what's in these two books, but with, with quite a bit more detail, more mathematical detail, since I think this is a really good audience for that. And I'll also be connecting it, a bit with some of the the bigger themes of the A LIFE conference and community and, dare I dare I say, even movement. You know, in particular, I actually wanted to begin with this wonderful sort of open problems in artificial life, summary paper, which, you know, has a number of of very illustrious co authors, you know, at least one of whom we heard from yesterday, and and more than one of whom are are are here at the conference. This is, you know, open problems, 14 open problems in artificial life in the year 2000. How does life arise from the non living? How does the transition, to life, in an artificial chemistry or an in silico environment can occur and why it occurs? I'm sure many of you know this was the the problem that bedeviled Darwin. You know, he made one of the most, rich and and, explanatorily powerful theories in ever in science in in discovering how evolution works, but he was unable to explain how evolution got started. He, at some point in one of his letters, said, you know, you might as well talk about the origin of matter. I think that the origin of matter and the origin of life might actually be one and the same thing, and evolution might actually be the answer to that question, But it's an evolution that includes, a term that Darwin did not account for in his original formulation. In section b of these questions, determine what is inevitable in the open ended evolution of life. I'm I'm hoping to speak a little bit about that too, create a formal framework for synthesizing dynamical hierarchies at all scales, and develop a theory of information processing, information flow, and information generation for evolving systems. I won't be going into the information theory in …