Crossover Creations

摘要

Around the middle of the 20th century, the great American-Hungarian mathematician, John von Neumann, who is best known as the father of programmable computers in the sense of internal computer programming, wrote a paper on "cellular automata." Its workings and effects were discussed at length in publications such as Scientific American. It was a seminal idea in what was to become the artificial intelligence (AI) business. It asked how self-reproducing computer programs could be organized and set in motion. Today, something very much like von Neumann's dream is being hatched. AI programmers have developed digital organisms that evolve, or try to evolve, in survival-of-the-fittest style.