![]() Barricelli charted a course for the digital revolution, and history has been catching up ever since. Visionaries often arrive before their time. That a progenitor has not received much acknowledgment is a failing not unique to science. “People weren’t ready for him,” Dyson says. “I probably know more about the history than most in the field and I’m not aware of him.”īarricelli was an anomaly, a mutation in the intellectual zeitgeist, an unsung hero who has mostly languished in obscurity for the past half century. “I have not heard of him to tell you the truth,” says Mark Bedau, professor of humanities and philosophy at Reed College and editor of the journal Artificial Life. “Look at how the planet works and it sure does look like a computation.”ĭespite Barricelli’s pioneering experiments, barely anyone remembers him. “What we’re really talking about here is the notion that living things are computations,” he says. Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith, for instance, says Barricelli stirred his earliest thinking about the possibilities for computer animation, and beyond that, his philosophical muse. Those images, and the ideas behind them, would influence computer animators in generations to come. Uncommonly for the time, he converted the digital 1s and 0s of the computer’s stored memory into pictorial images. Nonconformist biologist Craig Venter, in defending his creation of a cell with a synthetic genome-“the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”-echoes Barricelli.īarricelli’s experiments had an aesthetic side, too. His models bear striking resemblance to the one-dimensional cellular automata-life-like lattices of numerical patterns-championed by Stephen Wolfram, whose search tool Wolfram Alpha helps power the brain of Siri on the iPhone. In fact, Barricelli’s projects anticipated many current avenues of research, including cellular automata, computer programs involving grids of numbers paired with local rules that can produce complicated, unpredictable behavior. Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith says Barricelli influenced his earliest thinking about the possibilities for computer animation. Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation. “And the thing about geniuses is that they just see things clearly that other people don’t see.”īarricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life processes: a subdivision of what we now call “artificial life,” which seeks to simulate living systems-evolution, adaptation, ecology-in computers. “He was a brilliant, eccentric genius,” says George Dyson, the historian of technology and author of Darwin Among The Machines and Turing’s Cathedral, which feature Barricelli’s work. Until his death in 1993, Barricelli floated between biological and mathematical sciences, questioning doctrine, not quite fitting in. As he put it in a 1961 paper, in which he speculated on the prospects and conditions for life on other planets, “The author has developed numerical organisms, with properties startlingly similar to living organisms, in the memory of a high speed computer.” For these coded critters, Barricelli became a maker of worlds. He created laws that determined, independent of any foreknowledge on his part, which assemblages of binary digits lived, which died, and which adapted. His artificial universes, which he fed with numbers drawn from shuffled playing cards, teemed with creatures of code-morphing, mutating, melting, maintaining. Inside a simple red brick building at the northern corner of the Institute’s wooded wilds, Barricelli ran models of evolution on a digital computer. Barricelli, a maverick mathematician, part Italian and part Norwegian, had finagled time on the computer to model the origins and evolution of life. During the day the computer was used to make weather forecasting calculations at night it was commandeered by the Los Alamos group to calculate ballistics for nuclear weaponry. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other, Barricelli hovered over one of the world’s earliest and most influential computers, the IAS machine, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God.
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