Quantum artificial life created on the cloud

I remember predicting this years ago. I said life will eventually live as a simulation in the cloud if we can scale up quantum computers.

A scenario of artificial intelligence could see the emergence of circumstances in which models of simple organisms could be capable of experiencing the various phases of life in a controlled virtual environment. This is what has been designed by the QUTIS research group at the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry, but the scenario is that of quantum computers: an artificial life protocol that encodes quantum behaviours belonging to living systems, such as self-replication, mutation, interaction between individuals, birth and death, and has been executed on an IBM ibmqx4 cloud quantum computer. This is the first experimental realization on a quantum computer of a quantum algorithm of artificial life following Darwin's laws of evolution.

eurekalert.org...

This could be who we are in a nutshell. A simulation of life on a quantum computer. How can you distinguish life from artificial life? As quantum computers become more advanced, the two will become indistinguishable from each other.

In fact, nobody has witnessed evolution. It could simply be the product of some algorithms on a quantum computer.

At the end of the day, this is an inevitable conclusion if we scale up quantum computers.

Quantum computers will be so powerful. Quantum computers and classical computers basically can carry out the same computation. The power lies in how fast QC can carry out this computation. You can have a classical computer take 10 years to carry out calculations to solve a problem and a QC will take a few days to solve the same problem.

Just imagine that power. Think about how long it to to go from Newton, Einstein and QM with Bohr and Heisenberg. You have to factor in human noise like falling in love, eating, reading a book or going on vacation. These things mean Science will evolve slowly.

Imagine a powerful QC that can come up with the Science of Newton, Einstein and QM in a Month. This would be a singularity because this QC would be ahead of us. Imagine a QC 10,000 or 100,000 years ahead of us when it comes to understanding Science and Technology. It would become an Oracle to us and human learning can cease to exist because this. QC with A.I. will tell us everything. There would be nothing left to learn and human life and artificial life will merge together in the cloud. Who knows, maybe THIS IS US already.

a reply to: neoholographic

Stuff like this is so cool, great post!

I looked online about Quantum Computers and A.I. and they predicted when they learn easily and start making stuff and discovering stuff the stock market will at least double every month.

I hope I live to see that because that would be cool.

Does not require "the cloud" or quantum computing.

The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves, or, for advanced players, by creating patterns with particular properties.

en.wikipedia.org...

Looks like life. But it's not.

Just as they've redefined gender to mean whatever anybody wants it to mean; immigration to mean anybody who wants to cross the border into the United States; sexuality to mean any where you want to stick your pecker; so they want to redefine life to mean a digital signal. That makes us, humans, the creators, makes us gods.

Men are still men and women are still women.

A legal immigrant is still strictly someone who crosses the border legally and follows the laws of the land.

Healthy sexuality still does not mean someone who has sex with children or animals or automobiles.

And a computer program is still a computer program.

I don't give a damn what they call it.
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originally posted by: watchandwait410
a reply to: neoholographic

Stuff like this is so cool, great post!

I looked online about Quantum Computers and A.I. and they predicted when they learn easily and start making stuff and discovering stuff the stock market will at least double every month.

I hope I live to see that because that would be cool.

Good points.

The power of Quantum Computers will change everything.

originally posted by: Phage
Does not require "the cloud" or quantum computing.

The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves, or, for advanced players, by creating patterns with particular properties.

en.wikipedia.org...

Looks like life. But it's not.

Conway's life is a type of cellular automata

en.m.wikipedia.org...

It's a good algorithm to use for random 2d cave generation. Depending on how you tweak the rules you can get nice big open caverns or small twisting ones.

gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com...

Alright, I want to put forth an idea for people to toss around if they want. Let's say that these cloud habitating artificial "life-forms" are living life, mutating and evolving at whatever pace the pace is and all around doing whatever it is they're doing. Then, some being of our nature finds a way to inject their own version of the monolith into the cloud. I'm curious how that would influence the simulation.

What could or would the monolith be? Not just a big stone with simulated fake monkeys jumping around it being recorded by cameras with men filming them, but it could be a set of new laws or instructions to influence the simulation.

I mean just a curious thought.

a reply to: dug88

And it can look really lifey. Sometimes more than others. Make complicated rules and it gets more complex.

But it ain't life.

Or is it?

Requires neither the cloud nor quantum computing. But the latter may make it faster.

a reply to: neoholographic

It's a matter of ethic's for me, if virtual life ever achieves consciousness is it therefore still our property and right to use it for our purposes of should we then regard sentience regardless of it's origin as having the right to exist and control it's own destiny were that destiny is not a danger to ourselves?.

And is a virtual universe any different to a natural one for those that experience it from within it's confines, should we play the benign God to these being's or be cold and dispassionate treating them as an experiment and nothing more?.

Still if we ever managed to understand our own reality enough to simulate our own universe - or rather it's law's of physic's etc in minute detail then in theory we could watch civilization rise and fall in minutes that would take countless billions of years in our universe, we could even learn new theory's and sciences from these captive sentience's creation's, new art's, cultures that we never experience in our own universe all lain out before us and unfolding in such rapid speed (not that we ever could, a system capable of simulating our universe would by it's very nature have to be more complex than our universe and also outside of it so to simulate our universe perfectly would be impossible but this is merely hypothesizing so to continue with the thought).

Then they learn what we ourselves never had and through there immense understanding of there own universe and there exploration's of ours once they learn the truth of there own reality they may learn to escape into the higher reality beyond our own and turn us into there specimen's?.

a reply to: LABTECH767

There's a series of video games called Star Ocean. It basically follows that process. Facing deletion they end up using the developers' own tools to break out of their plane of existence into their creators' to be able to physically kick their asses.

a reply to: RealityIsAbsurd

Literally?

The Simulation world theory is not plausible.

If it were the case, the moment any human became self aware they were in a simulation, the system would likely error correct this and you would go to sleep and wake up non the wiser that you ever had such a thought. That's why that makes no sense.

a reply to: Phage

In regards to the video game series? Yeah, pretty much.

a reply to: Phage

Here's where you can find a synopsis of the plot:
en.m.wikipedia.org...:_Till_the_End_of_Time

The game series does a great job of drawing from drawing from science everything from gene editing to space travel and everything in between and outside. The source of magic in the series is a mixture of genetic modification or some weird form of science that is purposefully left kind of mystically unexplained.

You travel across several planets at various stages of development. On one planet the protaganists because they need the ability to do some repairs to fix their ship reluctantly teach one kingdom's scientists how to refine metal and utilize electricity even though it means tipping the scales in the war that's going on.

And ultimately they find out that a lot of the weird # that's going on in the universe is because they actually exist in a massive online game that's become corrupted from players hacking and cheating. So, the head developer decides to pull the plug, but the protagonists decide that they aren't having it. So, they find a way to use some ancient magical device to travel through and find themselves somehow in their creator's world. Which ultimately leads to them kicking dude's ass.

a reply to: Phage

Nah not life and there are better algorithms out there for simulating life and biological processes. Genetic and evolutionary algorithms are applied to lots of different things. None of it is actual life.

The last time I wrote cellular automata though the biggest speedup I got was after moving the y axis to the outer loop. It went from 40 seconds to about 3 for a 150x150 grid at 300 iterations or so. There's still a lot to be gained by optimizing classic algorithms.

I'm not sure if quantum computing would help so much. I know it's better than classical computing at solving some problems but most are still faster on a traditional computer. Then there's the whole uncertainty thing that makes most quantum algorithms not so useful for general computing. As far as I know most quantum computers are specialized for certain problems and aren't actually Turing complete.

I've looked at a few quantum APIs. They seem fairly limited. There's not many operations you can perform on a qbit and of course there's not very many of them. It's kinda like programming on an old computer from the 60's where you counted your memory by the bits.

Then again I may just not understand enough.

originally posted by: neoholographic

originally posted by: watchandwait410
a reply to: neoholographic

Stuff like this is so cool, great post!

I looked online about Quantum Computers and A.I. and they predicted when they learn easily and start making stuff and discovering stuff the stock market will at least double every month.

I hope I live to see that because that would be cool.

Good points.

The power of Quantum Computers will change everything.

... especially Bitcoin and cybersecurity.

Why is it that whenever I see the word "Quantum" I instantly feel the compelling urge to shout...

"BULLSH#T!!"

Very interesting article - thanks for posting it. The mutational aspect in the original paper was particularly interesting:

The implementation of mutations requires to combine the outcome of different designs of quantum circuit diagrams and, therefore, experimental runs. In this case, we consider that a mutation event, which can affect both individuals, is simulated with a σx. The complete result is achieved when gathering data from 4 different groups of experiments, that correspond to the cases of mutation on the first genotype, mutation on the second genotype, mutation on both genotypes and no mutation. We have performed 1024 experimental runs for each of the three cases with mutations and 8192 runs for the no-mutation rate. These results have been combined with the ones shown in Table 2, that coincide with the no-mutation case, with the goal of reducing the mutation rate for each individual, which takes a final value of 2/19. Table 4 contains the agreggated data of the mutation experiments. In IVb the mutation occurs before the self-replicating event, therefore affecting the second individual, in IVc the mutation can only occur after the second individual has been created, and IVd contains both mutations. See the illustration of this process in Fig. 3. See Table 4 for the measured data with a fidelity of 94.86% with respect to the ideal case in the σz basis.

One can show that a classical counterpart of this model would not be able to store the information of the time correlations. The correlations we are interested in are originated in the initial nonzero value of 〈σx〉 the precursor genotype, and afterwards propagated in each partial quantum cloning event because of the property mentioned above. In order to validate our claim, let us assume that the precursor genotype is given by an incoherent mixture of states of the form ρ = a|0〉〈0| + (1 − a)|1〉〈1|. Already from this point, one can see that 〈σx〉 = 0, and therefore no information is going to be propagated to the global correlations when more than one qubit is present. In other words, the purely quantum information is produced by a quantum superposition state between the basis elements and afterwards propagated through the entanglement of quantum living units. The interpretation of this phenomenon is that the quantum model allows to keep track of the relation between the individuals without the need of introducing additional variables to the ones that describe the genotype and phenotype.

Original paper: www.nature.com...

originally posted by: SR1TX
The Simulation world theory is not plausible.

If it were the case, the moment any human became self aware they were in a simulation, the system would likely error correct this and you would go to sleep and wake up non the wiser that you ever had such a thought. That's why that makes no sense.

Unless the goal of the simulation is for its participants to discover the reality of it.