Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
reproduce themselves, interact with other insect colonies through moving, and
disappear for various reasons (such as droughts and floods). We can regenerate
the past colony cycle of these insects, and could control them by different
methods.
15.2 Exploration of Artificial Life
For a long time, the mankind has been attempting to simulate the work of the
nature using new technologies, and understand the essence of the nature by
artificial methods. Early mechanical technologies offered tools, expanded the
capabilities of manual labor of people, and lightened the manual labor greatly. At
the beginning of the 20th century, the application of logic in arithmetic and
mechanical operations caused the abstract formalization of the procedure. Church,
Kleen, Turing, and Post formalized the concept of the logic sequence step, which
formed the foundation of realizing the mechanical processing. In the symposium
on brain and computer in Princeton Institute on January 6, 1945, it was
considered that the engineering and neural network were the foundations. Later,
Wiener put forward cybernetics. McCullouch and Pitts proposed M-P neural
network model. The interest of von Neumann was the research on the similarity
of brain and computer in organization, and how to represent the brain with formal
logics. On the conference on cybernetics in March, 1946, two groups formed, in
which one was the formal theory group headed by von Neumann, and the other
was the cybernetics group headed by Wiener. Von Neumann's method turned all
representations and mathematical calculations to basic logic world, and realized
the symbols with explicit logic process. The computer system architecture
proposed by von Neumann was the typical representative. Wiener began to use
the concept of information, feedback, control, etc, to study on the biological and
mechanical problems under the unified scientific concepts, which formed the
cybernetics school.
In the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, von Neumann put
forward the possibility theory of machine self-growth. Using the computers as
tools, we welcomed the development of information science. On the summer
conference in Dartmouth in 1956, McCarthy proposed the term of artificial
intelligence, which formed the research of artificial intelligence discipline. A lot
of early work of artificial life came from artificial intelligence. In the 1960s,
Rosenblatt drew specially study on the perceptron, and in the meantime Stahl set
up several models of cellular activities, by using the Turing machine as the
