Artificial Life
Can computers think? Well, not yet, but here are a few folks that are working on making that happen:
20Q.net - this is an online project to create a neural-net on the net. Contributors -- that is you -- participate by helping to train the program to recognize objects already in its database, or to add new objects to its database.
Conway's Life - here's an example of evolution in the computer, using a cellular automata simulation.
Bitozoa 2 - another evolution simulation.
Cafun - a set of Java applets that allows the simulation of complex systems.
Mbiti World - here's another simulation of evolution.
Boppers - a simulation program that was included in an artificial life book from the 90s. The book is posted online as well.
Planet Wator - another artificial life simulator.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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