We can simulate the climate and we can even simulate babies. Now, we can simulate life on Earth, too the vast and complex interactions of the living organisms on our planet.
Named Madingley, after the village in Cambridgeshire, UK, where the idea was dreamed up, it's a mathematical model that could help us predict the future. It could tell us what would happen if all the bees disappeared, the difference it would make if pandas died out, and what the world might have looked like if humans had never invented intensive farming. The work also suggests that the basic structures of all ecosystems can be predicted using a small number of universal ecological principles.
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Virtual Earth Plays Out Fate of Life on the Planet
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(Score: 1) by Gaaark on Thursday April 24 2014, @01:18AM
My enquiring mind wants to know!
Oh... nevermind. Had a beer, don't care anymore...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday April 24 2014, @01:35AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:44AM
Linux, Torvalds and Beers. OH MY!
(Score: 1) by nemasu on Thursday April 24 2014, @01:59AM
Wasn't there something similar in Japan a while ago? Earth simulator or something ... might have only been weather though.
I made an app! Shoutium [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday April 24 2014, @02:28AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday April 24 2014, @02:04AM
Because none of them are authoritative, since the whole scheme is are based on layers and layers of assumptions built on imaginary data, simplistic rules, and tuned with foregone conclusions. And none of the predictions could be proven or dis-proven.
So another junk science project gets big press.
I suspect Sim City would be as valid.
My Lawn, son! You're ruining the grass.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Boronx on Thursday April 24 2014, @03:49AM
Seriously. It's not like we even know all of the important interactions. Didn't they just recently find out that whales actually increase krill populations?
When they introduced wolves back into Yellowstone, the elk stopped hanging around the streams. This caused the stream banks to change dramatically since the elk weren't stomping them into a muddy mess all the time.
Predictable? Yeah, but only if your model of Elk behavior is accurate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:14AM
Now, hang on there... we're no longer at the beginning of 20th century, the Quantum Mechanics is well established, how dare you challenge it? (oh, you weren't speaking about QM? Sorry)
(my point: while modeling as a research method is tric(s)ky, it doesn't automatically make it invalid as a method, nor does it make "junk science" from its application)
An extraordinary claim you make here, padwan. I browsed TFA [plosbiology.org] and haven't seen signs of "tuning with foregone conclusions". But, since you make this extraordinary claim, I'm willing to give you the benefit of doubt, if only you'd be willing to come with some extraordinary evidence.
Heck, let's relax the requirement: would you be so kind to show some concrete elements suggesting the "tuning" you claim, be them extraordinary or not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Thursday April 24 2014, @05:17AM
To illustrate the point. Consider these scientists were space explorers and they happened upon the barren planet Earth circa 3.5 billion years ago. Would their simulation, given an input ecosystem of Zero living things, predict life and the eventual emergence of themselves? Would it predict the re-emergence of life after total extinction? Didn't think so. This example is not contrived. Despite their model itself being based upon the clear evidence of it, the simulation fails to consider the emergence of machine life.
Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, because that's what sentience is. Organic life is merely complex protein interactions within a cell. [youtube.com] Machine complexity is increasing at an exponential rate, faster than any life form in the history of the planet. In a few short decades machines have gained capabilities that took organic life billions of years to achieve. Their model does not account for exponential complexity increase of the symbiotic mecha-genesis, nor the nano-genesis that will follow the machine singularity, nor the quantum-genesis which will follow both of these. It doesn't even account for other planets let alone other unive--er, now I've said to much.
Nothing to see here folks, just another simulation within a simulation...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Oligonicella on Thursday April 24 2014, @06:49AM
To be honest, machines didn't *gain* anything, they were *given*. Helluva difference.
"Their model does not account for exponential complexity increase of the symbiotic mecha-genesis, nor the nano-genesis that will follow the machine singularity, nor the quantum-genesis which will follow both of these."
All of which is conjecture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:10AM
Not if you take The Wikipedia literally as the true authoritative collective,
rather than as a work of summary analogies created by the hands of many men.
The Wikis quite clear on these kinds of things, bro. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:34PM
Ah, I see, the start of a new religion. Only that this time, everyone is allowed to edit the holy book. ;-)
(Score: 1) by VortexCortex on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:34PM
Yes, the machines were *given* complexity to assist the organic process's propagation, much the same way complex Multi-Cellular life was *given* its complexity by a single cellular life to assist the lesser organic processes, much the way encapsulated cells of proteins were *given* their complexity by ecosystems of enzymes and proteins who found lipids to offer protection, much the way enzymes were *given* complexity by chemical reactions.
I see intelligence as a scalar value of any complex interaction. The giving of complexity to machines by humans is just like the boom of variety that occurred after enzymes had cell-walls, or after some life became multi-cellular, or the advances when complex life became more aware of its surroundings, humans will now augment themselves with ever greater ability to leverage knowledge of the universe. Our science is simply the same thing that natural selection has been doing with DNA: Trial and error, building upon better results to encode better information about the environment for future generations.
Where you draw an arbitrary line to separate make man and machine, I see no such dichotomy. Machines are part of mankind. Just like multi-cellular life wasn't *given* on helluva *gain*, man can not *give* machines any gain either: One does not give oneself an advantage, one can merely achieve greater knowledge (more information, more complexity) or learn new skills (gain more demonstrable knowledge).
The distinction between humans and apes is marginal genetically. I see no hard delineation, you are one and the same; Indeed you share DNA (cellular knowledge) with trees. Your dichotomies are arbitrary. There is no real difference between finger nails and shovels. One's encoding is passed to offspring in DNA, the other's encoding is passed to offspring in cultural knowledge, both are physical adaptations which are represented as information. There is no strong difference between computer RAM and your memories to me, they both do basically the same things, the former is just far more efficient; like the hand-trowel is to the fingernail.
The rate of life's advancement is accelerating. Using information theory I can plot life's increasing complexity. There is clear evidence of life's increase in complexity and explosion of adaptations at each marked complexity increase. Each great leap in complexity obliterates the prior models. Lipids allowed proteins to survive in harsher climates. TFA's model wouldn't predict that dead cells around clusters of cells which allowed life to climb another tier in complexity would eventually enable sentience and space exploration. If anything your argument only strengthens my own: The adaptation of sentience yields TFA's model obsolete. The rate of increase in complexity all throughout life's existence is plainly apparent, yet isn't accounted for by TFA's models. Take apes or dolphins, now if the sim doesn't allow for them to become sentient and travel to the moon and beyond just as humans can, or intelligently change their very ecosystem, then it is not a "general" or "universal" ecological model. Such claims are bogus.
Do you think climate change is conjecture? We have more evidence for the exponential complexity projection than for man made global warming. Just because we can't predict the future doesn't mean we should ignore all extrapolations. Physics wouldn't work otherwise: Science would be powerless to make ANY prediction. I put it to you that both projections should be heeded, but TFA does not.
It is a fact that the complexity of information interaction on this planet is increasing at a geometric rate. That is not conjecture. Mecha-genesis has already occurred. Machines exist, you fool.
(Score: 1) by deterioration on Thursday April 24 2014, @02:39PM
I would like to buy a vowel.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by smallfries on Thursday April 24 2014, @06:03AM
It is not always the role of science to prove or disprove. There are two different phases in scientific progress: exploration and validation. Simulation and modelling normally lies within the former. The idea is not to validate causual relationships, but rather to suggest causal relasionships that can then be validated by experiment.
It is always difficult to evaluate the worth of simulations: the same questions about demonstrating the realism of assumptions are in the reviews of all simulation work ever published. Among their arbitrary tuning choices I thought that the 10:1 predator to prey ratio sounded a bit dubious. Besides it is a distribution of values and picking the average for the model seems a bit unsound: is the rario preserved by a pride of lions taking down an elephant?
The most interesting simulations make their assumptions explicit: we found the no matter what value we set parameter X to, property Y always emerged in the simulation results, we are not sure why but it leads us to speculate relationship Z...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:56AM
I believe once you dispose of the scientific method, it becomes philosophy.
So while this "study" could be thrown into the 'Bad Science' bin by insistence;
It could be equally categorized into the 'Awesome Philosophy' bin by choice.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Thursday April 24 2014, @02:22AM
Created by Hari Seldon I presume?
(Score: 2) by maratumba on Thursday April 24 2014, @03:03AM
No, that's us.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:27AM
I did that with SimEarth in 19... eh, well..in black-green on a Hercules monitor in any case!
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:56AM
"The Madingley model is the first computer model to simulate the way in which all types of organisms interact on a global scale."
The first, right, sure. How many sim programs have there been, ranging from games to weather prediction?
Anyway, there hasn't been a program yet that can provide reliable predictions over anything more than short time-scales. The physical systems are just too complex and our understanding too shallow.
To take the current, most popular example, look at the climate models. A blogger used simple graphing techniques back in 2007, to predict future temperatures. His simplistic prediction is doing better than all the fancy climate models. [coyoteblog.com]
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.