title should read THE NEW PIG's TOOTH!

I'm wondering why there aren't more Christian responses online refuting and pointing out the weaknesses of the ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE programs that EVOUTIONISTS ARE TOUTING as their GREAT PROOF EVOLUTION IS TRUE!

The only sites I could find were PRO-EVOLUTION sites gloating over these programs.

I did find the paper by Michigan State and am going over it now..I'm finding what I believe are GREAT FLAWS in these programs but I'M NOT A COMPUTER SCIENTIST so, I can't substantiate my findings. Even so, some of my discoveries seem OBVIOUS EVEN TO ME.

Anyone have any more light on this subject? Christian rebuttal sites?

The following are excerpts taken from the papers...does it seem this AVIDA program is not left to run by itself but is basically written to do certain tasks and CERTAIN OUTCOMES can be controlled and SCHEDULED by the USER or EXPERIMENTOR?

These little CPUs ALREADY have the ability to make AUTOMATONS that make automata...so, where's the evolutionary steps leading up to the complex CPU and AUTOMATON? They were made by the INTELLIGENT COMPUTER PROGRAMMER not by RANDOM SELECTION.
I don't get it...this is not what we hear spouted by the atheists who gloat and jeer at creation!
There should be HUNDREDS of sites investigating this HOAX!


The Michigan State site where I found the papers are here:
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~ofria/cse891/papers/AvidaIntro.pdf


However, the assumptions put into
these simulations typically mirror exactly the assumptions of the analytical calculations.
Therefore, the simulations can be used only to test whether the analytic calculations are
error-free, or whether stochastic effects cause a system to deviate from its deterministic
description; they cannot test the model assumptions on a more basic level.


Avida is arguably the most advanced software platform to
study digital organisms to date, and is certainly the one that has had the biggest impact
in the biological literature so far.

Furthermore, whereas organisms are executed
sequentially in Tierra, the Avida system simulates a parallel computer, wherein all organisms
are executed effectively simultaneously. Since its inception, Avida has had
many new features added to it, including a sophisticated environment with localized
resources, an events system to schedule actions to occur over the course of an experiment,
multiple types of CPUs to form the bodies of the digital organisms, and a
sophisticated analysis mode to post-process data from an Avida experiment. Avida is
still under active development both at Michigan State University, led by Charles Ofria,
and at the California Institute of Technology, led by Claus Wilke.

2 Avida Organisms
In Avida, each digital organism is a self-contained computing automaton that has the
ability to construct new automata. The organism is responsible for building the genome
(computer program) that will control its offspring automaton, and handing that genome
to the Avida world. Avida will then construct virtual hardware for the genome to be
run on, and determine how the new organism should be placed in the population.
The specificsof this process are controlled by the user, as described in detail in the
next section.

With a certain probability, chosen by the experimenter, the
command h-copy does not properly copy the instruction at the location of the read
head to the location of the write head, but instead writes a random instruction to the
position of the write head. It is important to note that the instruction written will always
be a legal one, in the sense that the CPU can execute it.

I didn't realize these programs were taken seriously

I've been debating an atheist and he tossed this in as PROOF of Evolution!

The problem is when the words COMPUTER PROGRAM PROOVES EVOLUTION are introduced and we don't have a sensible argument to reassure those watching the debate then we allow doubt to be sown...especially in the younger christians lives...they have enough pressure in life.

We need to dash these little brushfires with water before they catch th e woods on fire.

I've been debating an atheist and he tossed this in as PROOF of Evolution!

The problem is when the words COMPUTER PROGRAM PROOVES EVOLUTION are introduced and we don't have a sensible argument to reassure those watching the debate then we allow doubt to be sown...especially in the younger christians lives...they have enough pressure in life.

We need to dash these little brushfires with water before they catch th e woods on fire.

Computer programming can never be equated with naturalistic evolution because of the very fact that computer programming necessarily requires a goal whereas evolution, apparently, doesn't. It's hardly surprising that code written to generate random outcomes generates random outcomes. It's no more surprising than code written to generate a specific outcome generates that specific outcome.

I mean sure it's nice on paper but welcome to the way things actually work.

I agree...but what's the POOR EVOLUTIONIST TO DO? They've lost the fossil record evidence battle and so now they are acting like the LIBERAL PRESS and saying things over and over knowing that enough people will just believe it because they hear it over and over...

take care...ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

many evolutionists are very miss-informed so I'm not surprised this was touted as 'proof' ... !

.

I am a computer scientist, and he's overstating things a bit. While they can model evolutionary theory using computer simulations, it really doesn't constitute proof.

Evolution requires a great deal of time and some assumptions concerning random mutations and how they occur over time. Since we cannot actually exist of billions of years to study things real-time, we can generate computer programs to simulate the vast amounts of time in days. Essentially, you generate software that creates objects that behave in both known and predicted ways, put them through the test of running for thousands or millions of generations, and then see if the results match what we see around us. Although it isn't "proof" of evolution, it does provide some very strong evidence that the logic behind it is sound.

I think that the vast majority of people - evolutionist, creationist and in-between - do not really understand the arguments. Your friend is putting too much faith in the AI they used in this case to prove something that it wasn't designed to prove. Such computer modeling is used very successfully in many areas, though, such as population tracking, traffic patterns and weather, and has proven to be quite useful.

Thanks Crawfish!

My basic observations about the AVIDA program not being STRICT evolution because the program can be monitored, altered, scheduled by the EXPERIMENTOR and not just left to pure random chance in a real interactive environment...do my observations seem fairly accurate to you?

harry

Thanks Crawfish!

My basic observations about the AVIDA program not being STRICT evolution because the program can be monitored, altered, scheduled by the EXPERIMENTOR and not just left to pure random chance in a real interactive environment...do my observations seem fairly accurate to you?

harry


Well...the simulation is only modeling certain behavior, it's not meant to "be" evolution. At best, it can prove that some assumptions are possible (or even likely), but it can't prove what actually happened.

The program won't be subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle; monitoring it does not change the results. And being able to introduce new factors is key to the model. For instance, you could schedule a world-wide cataclysmic event designed to destroy 95% of the total population, or you could schedule a smaller event designed to wipe out or nearly wipe out a particular species or a local population. Then you can sit back and see how the program responds.

I think a good test of such simulations would be to take some jumper cables and shock the computer memory holding the operating system instructions and the evolution program and see if the random changes improve the program.

Or we could write a bootsector program that makes randon changes on the hard disk each time it is accessed and see if the computer can benefit from simulation. Or we could just duplicate random sectors and see how that goes. Now to be fair, we could back out any changes that cause the computer to cease working and let it try again next time. We might have to turn off some autocorrection features and use a less rigorous check algorithm, but it could be done. We could even start with just a very simple operating system and program that just displayed "Hello World" on the monitor. I wonder what we would see? Do you think we would ever get a combination that would display the works of Shakespeare?

God Bless!

I think a good test of such simulations would be to take some jumper cables and shock the computer memory holding the operating system instructions and the evolution program and see if the random changes improve the program.

Or we could write a bootsector program that makes randon changes on the hard disk each time it is accessed and see if the computer can benefit from simulation. Or we could just duplicate random sectors and see how that goes. Now to be fair, we could back out any changes that cause the computer to cease working and let it try again next time. We might have to turn off some autocorrection features and use a less rigorous check algorithm, but it could be done. We could even start with just a very simple operating system and program that just displayed "Hello World" on the monitor. I wonder what we would see? Do you think we would ever get a combination that would display the works of Shakespeare?

God Bless!

Heh.

Be careful, though, you don't want to risk Skynet. ;)