Free Republic

I want to take a minute and talk about “systems”. When I speak of a system, I am talking about any collection of nodes and connections. Examples of systems include computers in a network, employees in an office, and puffs of air in a thunderstorm. A node is an individual unit in the system and a connection is the  interaction between two nodes.Let’s look at some generic systems. Did you notice something about the four node example? It has more connections than it does nodes. In fact, four nodes is the minimum number of nodes needed in a system...

Arlington, Va. -- If the evolution of complex organisms were a road trip, then the simple country drives are what get you there. And sometimes even potholes along the way are important. An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Michigan State University and the California Institute of Technology, with the help of powerful computers, has used a kind of artificial life, or ALife, to create a road map detailing the evolution of complex organisms, an old problem in biology. In an article in the May 8 issue of the international journal Nature, Richard Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert Pennock, and Christoph Adami...