**Navigation:** [[System (Process)]] | [[Research Question]] | [[System (Keywords)]] **Related:** [[Living Computation & Postdeterministic Digital Design]] | [[Artificial Life]] | [[Evolution of Adaptivity, Autonomy & Responsibility (Theory)]] --- # Dave Ackley **Resources:** [YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/@DaveAckley) | [Academic Page](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/#rh) | [Living Computation](https://www.livingcomputation.org/) --- ## Overview Dave Ackley is an American computer scientist and researcher, founder of the Living Computation Foundation. His work spans neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, artificial life, and biologically-inspired approaches to computational security and robustly scalable systems architecture. ## Key Concepts ### Living Computation Ackley's central thesis that biological and computational systems are fundamentally the same: > **"In the end, living systems and computational systems turn out to be the same thing. They may not seem that way now, but that's because we've got some wrong ideas about what machines and life really are."** ### Robust vs. Fragile Systems - **Biological life** can survive extraordinary disruptions and repair itself - **Current computers** are fragile (a single bit flip can crash the entire system) - **Living Computation** seeks to bring life-like qualities into computing ## Definition of Life Ackley defines life as a **self-repairing, space-filling, programmable computational system**: - **Self-repairing** - Ability to fix errors and damage - **Space-filling** - Capacity to spread and utilize resources - **Programmable** - Ability to change behavior based on new information ## Death as Teacher > **"Death is the only teacher in evolution."** This emphasizes that evolution operates through survival and elimination - mistakes are harshly punished by elimination, success rewarded by reproduction. ## Research Areas ### Artificial Life (ALife) - Interdisciplinary field synthesizing life-like processes in artificial substrates - Studies "life as it could be" rather than "life as we know it" - Explores possible forms of life regardless of chemical composition ### Evolutionary Algorithms - Methods that mimic natural selection for optimization - Generate solution variants, mutate/crossbreed randomly - Select most successful based on fitness function ### Robust Computing - Systems that function despite partial failure - Self-reconfiguration capabilities - Continuous evolutionary operation ## Connection to System Project Ackley's work directly relates to the System project's exploration of: - **Autonomous machines** evolving beyond pre-programmed behavior - **Electronic organisms** that exhibit life-like properties - **Evolutionary processes** generating unpredictable strategies - **Robustness** vs. fragility in artificial systems --- *See also: [[Norbert Weiner – Cybernetics]] | [[System Simulation – Genetic Algorithm]] | [[Machine Point Of View]]*