Revision as of 16:30, 3 May 2014

[incomplete]

Natural evolution

The products of natural evolution can directly or indirectly help for the first steps to advanced APM systems thus they are of interest here.

Limits of natural evolution

Evolution can only reach the places in design pace that are reachable by a sequence of small steps. E.g. bicycles, cars, spaceships and silicon microchips cannot be reached by evolution. It often has been argued that advanced diamondoid APM systems are infeasible because nature would have built them - a silly argument.

Naturally evolved polypeptides and their systems (the "machine" parts of living cells) have a number of limitations that make it desirable to move away from them as fast as possible. Polypeptides are:

• not as simple as possible
• not very stable (actually there are evolution related reasons for them to be on the threshold of stability) [Todo: which ones]
• not minimalistic in function - they always have to carry shape recognition structure around with them
• ... and some more ...

Systems of polypeptides are not decomposable that is they are not modular. Changing one thing changes almost everything. This making the engineering practice of narrowing down terrors or logical dependencies a nightmare.

Evolution of technology

Technological progress is composed of:

• targeted technological design
• technological serendipity and
• technological evolution.

It does not solely equate to anyone of these.

• lots of unexpected mergement of seemingly unrelated ideas
• brute force trial and error visiting much more dead ends than successful continuation points
• mixing and meshing is rather random (but not necessarily pairwise like in biology) one may argue about serendipity

small step limitation

Evolution of APM systems

APM systems do not evolve due to their system architecture which is similar to a microprocessor which with human help can calculate which adaptions to itself are necessary to perform better and not a microbe which adapts to the environment by itself.

It makes sense to put only one copy of the blueprint for a whole nanofactory into one macroscopic device and not put a copy in every potentially autogenous subunit of it. This alone makes the technology base quite Disater proof.

What could happen in AP systems with sensitive data storage is that radiation induced bit flips in data that describes high level structure cause what in biology is known as fasciation (e.g. repeat this structure 0100b = 4 times becomes repeat this structure 1100b = 12 times) or similar stuff (decopression artefacts mixed in).

artificial evolution

With effort one can augment highly parallel component testing with emulated evolution. To do so one can mix alternative combinations of compatible design choices according to a genetic algorithm (possibly at different levels of abstraction) synthesize a block with every tested unit different (very very many) and see what fairs best.

In most cases testing for improvement in a part that is in regular operation makes no sense - this is better done off site.