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The latest batch, before the Christmas batch arrives.

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The latest batch:

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The latest batch:

Some of these are recommendations, or acquisitions, from the recent Eastercon.

more brains, and coastal views

We've had multiple days of great talks and conversations, and lots of walks.  We've heard about evolving computer programs to become replicators and machine learning programs, evolving self-organising developmental pathways, song learning in zebra finches, navigation and learning "place" maps (when you move to a different room, you switch to a different mental map; might that be why you forget why you moved to the new room?), computing with spikes, future neuromorphic hardware, making brain-like circuits with very simple components (resistors, capacitors, batteries and memristors), a mnemonic for understanding the effect of different operations and memories (if one bit is a 1 ft box, then an adder is a room, a multiplier is the whole hotel, the closest memory cache is down on the sea shore, DRAM is Corsica, a hard drive is in Rome, and the cloud is on Jupiter!). Today the focus was on robots with neuromorphic brains, and the key role played by the environment.

May brain is full to overflowing, and we've still got a couple of days to go!  To decompress a bit, I went for a walk along a costal path.  Low rocky cliffs, with a few beaches scattered along the length.

some of the coves are sandy; this one is splendidly rocky

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The latest batch:

 

The company who I have been with for over 40 years for insuring house contents is no longer insuring house contents.  So we are looking for a new insurer.  

We have a lot of books (no!)  This causes issues: everyone who is quoting wants to insure them as "antiques", in danger of being stolen.  No, there are a lot of individually not very valuable books (some are indeed old, but not that old, and not rare).  No-one is going to steal these: it would take forever, and they have very little resale value.  We can't be the only ones in this situation, surely?

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I am beginning to catch up with my book databasing backlog.  Here's the batch from the end of October.

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These are some books we bought in York on the way home from our Scottish holiday in August, some undatabased books I discovered when I packed up my office in October, plus a few maths books related to a potential retirement project I'm thinking about.

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 The latest batch, comprising his'n'hers birthday presents.

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 The latest batch:

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 The latest, pre-Christmas, batch:

A third Checquy book!  I didn't know there was another one. Yay!

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 The latest batch:

This includes books bought at the Eastercon, books recommended by speakers at the Eastercon, gifts from someone clearing out an old house, a gift from an author, and the usual influx of other interesting books.

Mendel Museum

The EvoStar conference concluded with a very appropriate visit to the museum dedicated to Gregor Mendel, famous hereditary biologist and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno.

amazing plasterwork in the chapel ceiling

the library

Not just biology, but astronomy, too.  Wow!

Mendel's desk, instruments, and writings

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 The latest batch:

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 The latest batch:

• The Sandman boxed set is still in its clingwrap, so a bit fuzzy
• The two Natural Computing series Springer volumes are complimentary copies: I have just joined the series editor team.  If you want to write or edit a book for this series, in the field of Unconventional Computing or Artificial Life, please contact me!

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 The latest batch:

complexity and parasites

 Our new paper published today, open access:

Simon Hickinbotham, Susan Stepney, Paulien Hogeweg.
Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasitism: evolution of complex replication strategies.
Royal Society Open Science, 8(8):210441, 2021.

Abstract: Parasitism emerges readily in models and laboratory experiments of RNA world and would lead to extinction unless prevented by compartmentalization or spatial patterning. Modelling replication as an active computational process opens up many degrees of freedom that are exploited to meet environmental challenges, and to modify the evolutionary process itself. Here, we use automata chemistry models and spatial RNA-world models to study the emergence of parasitism and the complexity that evolves in response. The system is initialized with a hand-designed replicator that copies other replicators with a small chance of point mutation. Almost immediately, short parasites arise; these are copied more quickly, and so have an evolutionary advantage. The replicators also become shorter, and so are replicated faster; they evolve a mechanism to slow down replication, which reduces the difference of replication rate of replicators and parasites. They also evolve explicit mechanisms to discriminate copies of self from parasites; these mechanisms become increasingly complex. New parasite species continually arise from mutated replicators, rather than from evolving parasite lineages. Evolution itself evolves, e.g. by effectively increasing point mutation rates, and by generating novel emergent mutational operators. Thus, parasitism drives the evolution of complex replicators and complex ecosystems.

Parasites drive complexity.  But how?  Here, we examine the outcomes of some computer experiments using our Stringmol automata chemistry (where ‘molecules’ are short assembly language programs, that bind and execute to copy each other), where we can see parasites evolve, then see the measures that evolve that replicators use to guard against parasites, then the counter-measures that parasites use to get round these, then the counter-counter-measures, and so on.

evolution of complex execution strategies (see paper for details)

Interestingly, we don’t see separate lineages of replicators and parasites co-evolving, but rather each new strain of parasite evolves from a replicator, so that it can exploit that replicator’s defence code itself.

The original bioRxiv version of the paper got a mention in preLights.

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 The latest batch:

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 His ’n’ hers Christmas presents:

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 The latest batch: