Informatics

Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” Proceedings of the the 42nd Meeting of the Southeastern Symposium on System Theory, IEEE, University of Texas at Tyler, March 7-9, 2010, pp.290-297. Abstract: Abstract—Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated queries. Crafting a search algorithm to most efficiently extract this information is the job of the programmer. In many instances this is done using the programmer’s experience and knowledge of the problem being solved. For the Hamming oracle, we have the ability to assess the performance of various search algorithms using the currency Read More ›

Graduate Student Challenges Avida in Scientific Paper   Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Winston Ewert, a graduate student in computer science at Baylor University who recently co-authored a paper titled, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Ewert shares how reading Richard Dawkins led him to his current research in evolutionary computation and his criticisms of the Avida Simulation. Listen in as Ewert explains the scientific research behind his paper, and find out why intelligent design is attracting the interest of graduate students. For more on intelligent design research, visit The Evolutionary Informatics Lab and Biologic Institute.  

This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems.
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TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to:

. . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better. . . . You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. . . .With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can prov de digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing,”

The Challenge for ID
1) Is SETI’s methodology valid? Read More ›

Back in 2003 NATURE (vol 423, pp 139-144) published an article by Richard Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert Pennock, and Christoph Adami titled “The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features.” The abstract reads: A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features. We examined this issue using digital organisms—computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. Populations of digital organisms often evolved the ability to perform complex logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many genomic instructions. Complex functions evolved by building on simpler functions that had evolved earlier, provided that these were also selectively favoured. However, no particular intermediate stage was essential for evolving complex functions. The first genotypes able to perform Read More ›

In a previous UD discussion I started about incompleteness I made the following affirmation: intelligence and life are not computable. A commenter kindly asked me to provide justifications for my claim. Since at UD usually I try to separate different topics in different discussions, to be more focused and reader-friendly as possible, so here is my answer in a dedicated thread. My answer unavoidably implies to investigate first what intelligence is then what life is (given the latter is an effect and the former is its cause). Read More ›

Our friend and colleague Atom tha Immortal has finished up the WEASEL GUI at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (go here for the GUI). It implements every conceivable interpretation of Dawkins’s WEASEL program as outlined in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. Thanks Atom for all your hard work!

Jeff Shallit charges Jonathan Wells with incompetence for claiming that duplicating a gene does not increase the available genetic information. To justify this charge, Shallit notes that a symbol string X has strictly less Kolmogorov information than the symbol string XX. Shallit, as a computational number theorist, seems stuck on a single definition of information. Fine, Kolmogorov’s theory implies that duplication leads to a (slight) increase in information. But there are lots and lots of other definitions of information out there. There’s Fisher information. There’s Shannon information. There’s Jack Szostak’s functional information. Information, when quantified, typically takes the form of a complexity measure. Seth Lloyd has catalogued numerous different types of complexity measures used by mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. Here Read More ›

This opportunity is dedicated to Darwinists/evolutionists or any ID denier who sincerely desire to become convinced IDer but failed the target until today. It is a great opportunity that unfortunately Darwin could not get at his times (you will understand why at the end). Read More ›

Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was one of the more powerful scientific mind of the 20th century. His works span from functional and numerical analysis to quantum mechanics, from set theory to game theory, as well as many other fields of pure and applied mathematics. He was a pioneer in computer science, the first real computers were developed according to a basic model that takes his name (“von Neumann architecture”). Read More ›

Semiotix – Stephen Pain The distinction between “theorising” and “belief” is extremely important because our attitude differs towards them. In a theory the reified concept of the sign does not have an ontological status but an epistemological one. While in belief, the concept has often a clear ontological one. Uexküll believed in his concept of the Bauplan in the same way as Bergson believed in the vital force. The concept of a plan is of course no different from the creationist’s concept of “intelligent design”. Any usage of the Bauplan is further complicated by its ideological usage in The Biological State, Uexküll‘s template for the German State, one that was anti-democratic and in many instances attractive to the Nazi of Read More ›

In informatics metaprogramming is a technique consisting in developing computer programs (sets of instructions) that output other programs. While simple programming means instructions generating data, metaprogramming means instructions generating instructions. In general the prefix “meta” means a thing/cause that stays at a higher semantic/ontological level than another thing/effect (in the case of metaprogramming we have a two-level hierarchy where a parent program creates child programs). For a tutorial introduction to metaprogramming see for example the following Jonathan Bartlett’s brilliant articles:
one, two and three.

DNA contains instructions, biological code for working-out various constructive cellular jobs (making proteins, setting developmental parameters, etc.). Question (inspired by the above ascertainment and readings): does DNA contain also meta-programs beyond simple programs?

Much DNA (outside its coding-for-proteins portions) seems without function (junk-DNA). Is it possible that some junk-DNA is meta-code able to assembly other DNA code? This could be an interesting ID prediction. Many have noted as the information amount contained in the genomes seems really too little to account for the overall complexity of organisms. Metaprogramming would be exactly one of the techniques able to compress the biological information. Read More ›