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Scientists Just Created Quantum Artificial Life For The First Time Ever
Encoding behaviours related to self-replication, mutation, interaction between individuals, and (inevitably) death, a newly created quantum algorithm has been used to show that quantum computers can indeed mimic some of the patterns of biology in the real world.
[...] Using the IBM QX4 quantum computer, the researchers coded units of quantum life made up of two qubits (those basic building blocks of quantum physics): one to represent the genotype (the genetic code passed between generations) and one to represent the phenotype (the outward manifestation of that code or the "body").
These units were then programmed to reproduce, mutate, evolve and die, in part using entanglement – just as any real living being would. Random changes were introduced via rotations of the quantum state to simulate mutation, for example. The good news is that these actual quantum calculations matched theoretical models the team had come up with back in 2015.
Also at Motherboard.
Quantum Artificial Life in an IBM Quantum Computer (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-33125-3) (DX)
[Not be confused with John Horton Conway's Game of Life from 1970. --Ed.]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday October 08 2018, @02:41AM (4 children)
Except that it's nothing like any living being would, and except that real living beings are not two bit representations of zero dimensions.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Monday October 08 2018, @03:04AM (3 children)
Would you call a virus a living being? I do believe they reproduce, mutate, evolve and die as well. Yet they are nothing like "real living beings." Just saying that because their "quantum life" does not use the same mechanisms as living things the behavior is still worth studying.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday October 08 2018, @04:49AM
I'm not sure that they die, because I am not sure that they live. But a virus--a real, DNA-having complex thing that does interact with other things that do live and die--whether itself a living being or not--has a lot more in common with us than it does with simulated quantum bits.
No one is saying that interesting simulations may not be worth studying. Not only can we learn about life by simulating it, but we can learn about quantum computing, a fairly new field compared to other areas of computer science. A win-win.
That does not, as it happens, make an array of qibits just like "any real living being", as you seem to be equating with the importance of simulation and the study thereof.
The "people" you might have in a "The Sims" save-game aren't, in much the same way, "real living beings" either.
That's just not how that works, whether your simulation is by a videogame company, a university, or the research arm of a major corporation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @04:51AM
The smallest virus known according to a cursory search has about 1700 pairs (that's not a bit, those have 4 configurations). So it's far off from 1 bit (quantic or not) to represent the genotype. So yeah it's barely enough info to make an interesting screensaver.
The interesting part is what working with amplitudes on the qbit means when you interpret the model, even if it's simplistic.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday October 08 2018, @08:20AM
I remember the line in my biology book at school: “Viruses don't live, they get lived.” (I hope I translated that well; the original German line was: “Viren leben nicht, sie werden gelebt.”)
Basically, the virus only contains the instructions, and an injection mechanism. The actual life processes are provided by the infected cells. The cells then start producing new viruses.
In some sense, sure. But really, they don't reproduce by themselves, they instruct living cells to reproduce them.
A chain letter causes susceptible humans to make copies of that letter. Would you consider the chain letter a living being? Or even a sentient being, given that the copying involves sentience?
Mutation isn't something an organism does, mutation is what happens to the organism. If a bit is flipped in your computer by cosmic radiation, that's also a mutation. And if it happens to be in a file that is downloaded by others, the mutation even spreads.
Also the above mentioned chain letter may mutate, as humans tend to make errors when copying texts.
Sure, that's implied by the previous two points. Note that cars evolve, too.
Depends on your definition of “die”. They can die the same way a hard disk dies: By being damaged in a way that they cannot perform their function, or being completely destroyed. But they don't die in the sense that their life functions are terminated, since they don't have any. That's why antibiotics cannot help against viruses: The only life functions involved in their reproduction are those of the host (of course there are “antibiotics” that could stop those; they are called poisons, and they are not used to treat virus infections for obvious reasons).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.