Silicon-based Life Form

Full Title or Meme

A Silicon-based Life Form is a real-world entity, or artificial intelligence, that may even have legal standing in a jurisdiction.

Context

• The term Silicon-based comes from the common constituent of the chips that make up computing machines on which artificial intelligence instances operate.

Artificial Life

The first attempts an creating artificial life was the Mechanical Turk, a fraud perpetrated in the 1850's showed a mechanized contraption that was claim could play chess. Machines that could emulate a variety of animal functions have been popular for centuries. On in the twentieth century was an attempt to understand life by looking at fully artificial emulations even possible.

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine that will do just that. -- John von Neumann

In 1951 the very early years of the digital computer John von Neumann invited Nils Barricelli "for two terms. Using the computer that von Neumann had built at the Institute for Advanced Study, Barricelli simulated the evolution of populations of artificial organisms. Each organism was represented by a genome consisting of a string of numbers. Random mutations and sexual exchange of genes caused populations to evolve. Barricelli observed the phenomena of speciation, parasitism, and predation arising spontaneously in his computer runs. He also observed punctuated equilibrium, the tendency of dominant species to remain static for many generations and then suddenly give way to new dominant species of a different character. He was a pioneer of the new science of Artificial Life, forty years before it became fashionable. With astonishing ingenuity he was able to simulate sophisticated evolutionary processes on a machine with a total memory of four kilobytes."

• For details on other life-form genesis see the wiki page on Carbon-based Life Forms.