Bugs with Byte : In a UCLA lab, tiny computer ‘ants,’ the products of an infant science known as artificial life, struggle to evolve. Their existence may seem futuristic now. But just wait, researchers say.

The colony is doomed.

In a previous generation, a deadly defect was somehow planted in the genetic code. Now, the iron hand of extinction is reaching out. The colony’s members--inefficient, clumsy and hapless--are failing the basic survival task of gathering and storing food.

It sounds grim. But, fortunately, it’s only a videotaped computer display. The dots dashing across the screen are not gripped in a drama of real life and real death.

At least not yet.

These computer “ants,” inspired by the insects that love picnics, are a product of an infant science called artificial life. For UCLA computer scientist David Jefferson, the ant colonies are a small step toward the creation of life--or something indistinguishable from it--in a computer.

At the moment, though, the ants exist only as calculations in the guts of a five-foot black cube surfaced with dancing red lights. The Connection Machine, a $1.2-million monolith designed by Thinking Machines Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., and tucked in a locked room at UCLA, makes possible the billions of calculations needed to model hundreds of generations of ants struggling to evolve in an electronic environment.

When it comes to running artificial ant programs, the Connection Machine is “maybe 10 times faster” than any other supercomputer in the world, said Rob Collins, 25, the graduate student who has done much of the laborious programming.

At UCLA and other universities and think tanks throughout the United States and Europe, scientists are seeking to develop computer programs--and, in some cases, robots--that mimic aspects of life, such as reproduction, food-gathering and evolution.

If Jefferson and his colleagues get good at this, they may one day spawn electronic creatures that are independent of their programmers, that are, arguably, alive.

These programs would evolve on their own, developing such traits as cooperative behavior without human intervention. Some believe these open-ended computer programs--an outgrowth of the computer modeling now used to study such complex phenomena as the weather and global economies--could make themselves intelligent.

To an extent, the programs are already independent. Jefferson is never quite sure how the ants will behave.

“It’s incredibly exciting to build a program and then you sit there,” he said. “Sometimes its work is done in an hour, sometimes its work is done in 24 hours. And you don’t know what’s going to happen. Within wide limits you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s discovery.”

It is also far-out stuff that, besides some practical applications, may provide answers to deep mysteries: What is life? How does evolution transpire? How do consciousness and mind develop?

At the same time, artificial life is creating moral and philosophical questions about the potential dangers of playing God with electronic creatures. In fact, a “whole zoology of self-reproducing computer codes” already exists, said Christopher Langton, an artificial life scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and organizer of conferences on artificial life.

These codes are variations of so-called computer viruses that have wreaked highly publicized havoc in computer networks over the last few years, he said. And it is probably possible to write codes that are even more virulent.

“There are a number of us who could probably write evolving virus computer codes right now, but don’t want to because of the consequences,” Langton said. Such a code would be “the moral equivalent of turning a genetically engineered toxin loose in a reservoir,” he added.

Langton noted that artificial life research is often--and aptly--compared to “Frankenstein,” the famous novel by Mary Shelley about a doctor who creates a monster and is destroyed by it. “The real monster there is the scientist himself who refuses to take responsibility for his actions,” Langton said. “The monster was actually quite a reasonable fellow.”

It is important, Langton stressed, that an ethical framework be developed to deal with problems that might arise in artificial life. “We don’t want to solve the (scientific) problems before we understand the consequences,” he explained.

The UCLA work is only one in a “melting pot” of artificial life projects, Langton said, adding that the field began to emerge only three years ago when he organized the first conference on the subject.

Langton, who edited a 655-page book of papers on artificial life published last year, has plans to create a quarterly journal on the topic.

An essay by Langton offers a working definition of artificial life: “the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems. It complements the traditional biological sciences . . . by attempting to synthesize life-like behaviors in computers and other artificial media.”

Langton has also written that artificial life represents “life as it could be,” as opposed to “life as we know it.”

At least one scientist argues that “life as it could be” does not necessarily require human participation. Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute envisions a time when the human race will step aside, handing off its existence, culture and purposes to machines that have made themselves smarter, wiser and tougher than us.

Others have visions less sweeping and ominous than Moravec’s “post-biological life.” But they too believe that artificial life has potentially profound importance as an experimental tool for exploring gaps in evolutionary theory and, possibly, solving age-old mysteries about consciousness and mind.

Whether any of this will happen is anybody’s guess, say those in the field.

But uncertainty is no deterrent to enthusiasm.

On a recent morning, Jefferson stood in front of a monitor showing the scampering of thousands of ants grouped in colonies. The ants were actually red dots searching for green bits of food. Successful hunters left a fluorescent purple trail. Each ant was the product of a computer code called a genetic algorithm, which over time allows for variations in the creation of individual ants and colonies.

Watching the clusters on the screen, Jefferson searched out the doomed colony and said, “See this big green pile here? The ants are supposed to go out and gather food and take it back to their nests, but this particular colony goes out and gathers the food but drops it elsewhere in the environment.”

The colony, Jefferson said, is in deep trouble.

“Through some unfortunate mating or unfortunate mutation, (this colony) has lost part of the ability to get the food back to the nest,” he explained. “Surely that one would not be represented in the next generation. We describe it as the colony that plays with its food.”

It is the 240th generation of ants created by a particular computer run, Jefferson said, noting that the first generation did not even look for the food. So some evolution has taken place without human intervention.

But Jefferson isn’t terribly impressed with the results, even this far down the line.

“The general strategy that they seem to have evolved is to leave the nest, head generally south or southeast for food,” he explained. “They’re so stupid they don’t look in other directions away from the nest.”

On another morning, Jefferson, dressed in a knit shirt and jeans, sat at an outdoor cafe on the UCLA campus, drinking cappuccino. The 41-year-old scientist was direct and often blunt in delivering a short course on artificial life.

While he is a trained computer scientist, Jefferson also considers himself a well-informed amateur in several other areas, particularly in biology and especially in evolutionary theory. He has been intrigued by artificial life for at least a decade. Before computer ants, he and his colleagues have worked on programs that modeled sage grouse and mosquitoes.

He has also become knowledgeable about ants--the real ones.

Jefferson is a hard-nosed, no-nonsense man who has no time for the metaphysical potentials in artificial life research, said Charles Taylor, a UCLA biologist who has worked with Jefferson for several years.

“If you are very broad in your definition of life and say that it’s any complex process that exists in populations and is self-reproducing with variation and can undergo evolution and adapt to its environment, we’ve already done that,” Jefferson said, referring to the ants.

“If those phrases are what you require, that’s what we do routinely and have for years. But if you mean producing something of the same complexity of behavior of something that’s indisputably alive, like a bacterium, we are at least a factor of 10,000--but no more than a million--away from that. Which means, in my opinion, probably by the time I retire 20 to 30 years from now, we’ll be able to do that,” he said.

Many, maybe most, “serious” thinkers today believe it is “really the pattern of behavior, the process of behavior, and not the substance of behavior that characterizes life,” he said.

In fact, he asserted, life is mathematics. “If you define life in such a way that computations simply cannot be included, either you have too poverty-stricken a notion of life or you have too poverty- stricken a notion of computation,” he said. “Because there isn’t any living phenomenon known, no mental phenomenon, no living phenomenon known that we cannot capture somehow in software. If not today, then some day.”

Life is not synonymous with intelligence, he said, noting that many people make this mistake when introduced to the swirls and eddies of artificial life.

Jefferson’s stance helps to separate artificial life from the 30-year-old field of artificial intelligence, which seeks to make machines with human-like intelligence right off the bat.

“Only an incredibly tiny fraction of life on Earth has any ability that you would call intelligent,” he said. “The world is full of microorganisms and plants and clams and insects, and that’s 99.9% of all the biomass on the planet, and none of it is intelligent. . . .”

That said, however, Jefferson embarked on a look at the characteristics an intelligent, living computer program might have.

“There is nothing magic about personality. There is nothing magic about language except complexity,” he said. “It’s clear that our personalities collectively and individually are the products of evolution . . . . These creatures would have a range of personalities that would be as broad or as narrow as those of other species that we know. But they would not be human personalities.”

In the present, though, Jefferson believes that artificial life computer models have significant potential, primarily as experimental tools to sharpen understanding of evolution and other aspects of biology.

“There’s an awful lot of skepticism even among scientists--not biologists but among other not very biologically informed scientists--and certainly in the public at large, that somehow evolution is not sufficient explanation for the exquisite complexity we see in the world, that a billion years is just not enough time to go from microorganisms to trees and lobsters. Biology will never be complete until we are able to make that case indisputable.”

Meanwhile, biologist Taylor said he was drawn to artificial life partly because it might eventually lead to a better understanding of consciousness and mind, two elusive properties of life that continue to intrigue him.

“My feeling was . . . that there was a possibility that we might be able to--not write a program that was conscious or a computer that was conscious--but maybe that we could evolve consciousness. Possibly we could identify the conditions that favor the evolution of mind and consciousness and evolve computer programs to do that.”

But before that point is reached, Taylor stressed his belief that artificial life programs should address concrete problems in evolutionary biology and ecology. For instance, Taylor, a population geneticist, has used early artificial life programs to fine-tune mosquito abatement programs.

He also noted that some of his interests are too nebulous for his colleague Jefferson, but they have found common ground in hard, practical problem-solving.

Of their working relationship, Jefferson quipped, “He thinks I’m a naive materialist and I think he’s a mystic.”