Re: What language will be used to write the first self aware program?

Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On 2006-03-30 09:57:42 -0500, "Tayssir John Gabbour"
<tayss_temp2@xxxxxxxxx> said:

Aren't there many programs which take their own existence into account?

Maybe certain Corewars programs and viruses do.
http://www.koth.org/

But merely statically taking its own existence into account isn't
really what we mean by self awareness.

I'll extend the example I used with Pascal's quine. If we alter this
quine, the quine can't know it's been altered and will blithely execute
incorrectly. If we were to, by analogy, genetically modify a human
being so that his offspring were chimpanzees instead of humans
(assuming fo the moment that this were possible) she would recognize
that these children were not as they should be.

Awareness entails adaptive responsiveness to one's environment. Self
awareness additionally entails adaptive responsiveness to one's self as
another element in one's environment.

Various creatures are variously aware. For example, given two otherwise
identical targets that differed only in their reflection of near
ultraviolet radiation, you and I would not be able to distinguish
between them. A honey bee would. Bees are aware of the near ultraviolet
spectrum and we are not.

People are aware of their capacity to reproduce themselves. Quines are not.

Yes, I'd probably agree that quines don't meet my intuitive definition
of "self aware" either.

But what do you think about the examples I mentioned, like possibly
Corewars programs and viruses? I haven't looked at them closely; maybe
all to date have operated under such restricted environments that they
don't dynamically observe where they currently fit into the world.
(Because too much intelligence is bad for survival in those
environments.)

But I can imagine a virus which keeps track of its instances; and tries
to alter its own code to slip under the radar, depending on what
enemies it finds.

Tayssir

.