CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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stevestory: | Quote | Holy Toledo, from the second link by Salvador Cordova
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Ok, so let’s do an experiment. Let’s subject bacteria or plants or any organism to radiation and thus increase the mutation rate mutation rate by a factor of 1 million or 1 billion. Do you think the above formula will still hold? We tried it in the lab, it killed the plants, and at some point rather than speeding evolution we are doing sterilization.
Well Check-Goddam-Mate Evilushunists! |
Remember when he tried that experiment with Avida? IIRC, he turned the point mutation rate to 11 and then was surprised to see that the population continued to grow?
As I recall, Richard B Hoppe had to get one of the authors of Avida to figure out what was going on. Turns out that Sal's barrage of digital cosmic rays instantly blew every digital organism to bits. Then the Avida machinery kept churning the bits. Every time one of the chunks that Avida used to recognize an organism floated by, the program increased the population count by one.
Reminds me a little of the Encode project.
Sal talks about it here, but it apparently happened in 2004 on ARN and the link he gives doesn't work so it may be lost.
Of course, to hear Sal tell it, the episode was his way of making an important contribution to the Avida documentation. All traces of shame, humiliation and dumbfuckery have magically disappeared.
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