Life, the Universe … everything

Life, the universe and everything

The Formal Darwinism project probes the connections between the dynamics of natural selection and the design of organisms. Here, I explain why this work should be of interest to philosophers, arguing that it is the natural development in a long-running scholarly enquiry into the meaning of life. I then review some of my own work which has applied the tools of Formal Darwinism to address issues ...

A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything

Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible universes, and chat about perceived and true randomness, life, generalization, and learning in a given universe.

Life, the Universe, and Everything: An Interview with David Haussler

Among the pantheon of computer scientists who have framed our capacity to interpret DNA sequences stands David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Applying his prowess in computer learning theory to the problems of protein modeling and gene structure prediction, Haussler emerged in the mid-1990s as a trail-blazer in the field of computational biology. He came to wider p...

Life, the universe, and everything: an education outreach proposal to build a traveling astrobiology exhibit.

Astrobiology is a transdisciplinary field with extraordinary potential for the scientific community. As such, it is important to educate the community at large about the growing importance of this field to increase awareness and scientific content learning and expose potential future scientists. To this end, we propose the creation of a traveling museum exhibit that focuses exclusively on astro...

Life, the Universe, and Everything: 4.5 Billion Years of Evolvable Hardware