Chaos Theory: The Science Behind the Miracle of Intelligent Life | Doc Of The Day

foreign [Music] this is a film about one very simple question how did we get here [Music] these are the elements and compounds from which all humans are made they're incredibly almost embarrassingly common in fact almost 99 percent of the human body is a mixture of air water coal and chalk with traces of other slightly more exotic elements like iron zinc phosphorus and sulfur in fact I've estimated that the elements which make up the average human cost at most a few pounds but somehow trillions of these very ordinary atoms conspire miraculously to organize themselves into thinking breathing living human beings how the wonders of creation are assembled from such simple building blocks is surely the most intriguing question we can ask you may think that answering it is beyond the realm of science but that's changing for the first time I believe science has pushed past religion and philosophy in daring to tackle this most fundamental of questions [Music] this film is the story of a series of bizarre and interconnected discoveries that revealed a hidden face of nature that woven into its simplest and most basic laws is a power to be unpredictable it's about how inanimate matter with no purpose or design can spontaneously create exquisite beauty how the same laws that make the universe chaotic and unpredictable can turn simple dust into human beings it's about the discovery that there is a strange and unexpected relationship between Order and Chaos [Music] [Applause] [Music] the natural world really is one great blooming buzzing confusion mess of quirky shapes and blotches because there are are never regular it repeats exactly [Music] the idea that all this Mayhem all this chaos is underpinned indeed determined by mathematical rules and that we can work out what those rules might be runs counter to our most dearly held intuitions [Music] so not surprisingly the first man to really take home the momentous task of unraveling Nature's mysterious mathematics had a very special and unusual mind he was both a great scientist and a tragic hero he was born in 1912 in London its name was Alan Turing volunturing was a remarkable man one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived he discovered many of the fundamental ideas that underpin the modern computer also during the second world war he worked here at Bletchley Park just outside today's Milton Keynes in what was then a secret government project called station X which was set up to crack the German military codes the station X code Breakers proved highly effective and turing's contribution was crucial the work he personally did to crack German Naval codes saved thousands of Allied lives and was a turning point in the war but code breaking was just one aspect of turing's Genius just one part of his uncanny ability to see patterns that are hidden from the rest of us for touring the natural world offered up the ultimate codes and over the course of his life he'd come tantalizingly close to cracking them Turing was a very original person and he had realized that there was this possibility that simple mathematical equations might describe aspects of the biological world and no one had thought of that before [Music] of all Nature's Mysteries the one that fascinated Turing most was the idea that there might be a mathematical basis to human intelligence Turing had very personal reasons for believing in this it was the death of this young man Christopher Morgan who and during well he was gay and it'd been been a great emotional thing of his life at that point Christopher Malcolm suddenly died and Alan's hearing was very obviously he was very emotionally disturbed by this but you can see that he wanted to put this in a intellectual context the scientific context and the question he wanted to put into context was what happens to the mind what happens what is it Turing became convinced that mathematics could be used to describe biological systems and ultimately intelligence this Fascination would give rise to the modern computer and later ensuring's life an even more radical idea the idea that a simple mathematical description could be given for a mysterious process that takes place in an embryo [Music] the process is called morphogenesis and it's very puzzling [Music] at first all the cells in the embryo are identical [Music] then the cells begin to Clump together and also become different from each other how does this happen with no thought no Central coordination how do cells that start off identical know to become say skin While others become part of an eye morphogenesis is a spectacular example of something called self-organization and before touring no one had a clue how it worked [Music] then in 1952 Turing published this his paper with the world's first mathematical explanation for morphogenesis of this paper was staggering in it curing used a mathematical equation of the kind normally seen in papers on astronomy or Atomic physics to describe a living process no one had done anything like this crucially curing's equations did for the first time describe how a biological system could self-organize they showed that something smooth and featureless can develop features one of the astonishing things about turing's work was that starting with the description of really very simple processes that were governed by very simple equations by putting these together suddenly complexity emerged the pattern suddenly came out as a natural consequence and I think in many ways this was very very unexpected [Music] in essence turing's equations described something quite familiar but which no one had thought of in the context of biology before think of the way a steady wind blowing across sand creates all kinds of shapes the grains self-organize into ripples waves and dunes this happens even though the grains are virtually identical and have no knowledge of the shapes they become part of curing argued that in a very similar way chemicals seeping across an embryo might cause its cells to self-organize into different organs foreign 's own very rough scribblings of how this might work they show how a completely featureless chemical soup can evolve these strange blobs and patches in his paper he refined his sketches to show how his equations could spontaneously create markings similar to those on the skins of animals Turing went around showing people pictures saying doesn't this look a bit like the patterns on a cow and everyone thought of what what is this man on about but actually he knew what he was doing because yeah indeed his pick they did look like the patterns on the cow and that's one of the reasons why cows have this sort of dapple pattern or whatever so an area where mathematics had never been used before pattern formation in biology animal markings suddenly the door was opened and we could see that mathematics might be useful in that sort of area so even though turing's exact equations are not the full story they are the first piece of mathematical work that showed there was any possibility of doing this kind of thing [Music] of course we now know that morphogenesis is much more complicated than the process turing's equations describe in fact the precise mechanism of how DNA molecules in our cells interacts with other chemicals is still fiercely debated by scientists the turing's idea that whatever is going on is deep down a simple mathematical process was truly revolutionary I think Alan turing's paper is is probably the Cornerstone in the whole idea of how morphogenesis Works what it does is it provides us with a mechanism something that Darwin didn't for how pattern emerges Darwin of course tells us that once you have a pattern and it is coded for in the genes that may or may not be passed on depending on circumstances but what it doesn't do is explain where that pattern comes from in the first place that's the real mystery and so what what Turing had done was to subtly provide an accessible chemical mechanism for doing this that was amazing [Music] Turing was onto a really big bold idea sadly we can only speculate how his extraordinary mind would have developed his idea because shortly after his groundbreaking paper on morphogenesis a dreadful and completely avoidable tragedy destroyed his life after his work breaking codes at Bletchley Park you might well have assumed that Turing would have been honored by the country he did so much to protect this couldn't be further from the truth what happened to him after the war was a great tragedy and one of the most shameful episodes in the history of British Science [Music] the same year Turing published his morphogenesis paper he had a brief affair with a man called Arnold Murray the affair went sour and Murray was involved in a burglary at turing's house but when Turing reported this to the police they arrested him as well as Murray [Music] in court the prosecution then argued that Turing with his university education had led Murray astray he was convicted of gross indecency the judge then offered Turing a dreadful choice he could either go to prison or sign up to a regime of female hormone injections to cure him of his homosexuality he chose the latter and it was to send him into a spiral of depression on the 8th of June 1954 turing's body was found by his cleaner he died the day before by taking a bite from an Apple he'd laced with cyanide ending his own life Alan Turing died aged just 41. the loss to science is incalculable Turing would never know that his ideas would Inspire an entirely new mathematical approach to biology and that scientists would find equations like his really do explain many of the shapes that appear on living organisms foreign looking back we now know Turing had really grasped the idea that the wonders of creation are derived from the simplest of rules he had perhaps unexpectedly taken the first step to A New Kind of Science [Music] the next step in this story was just as unexpected and in many ways just as tragic as tourings in the early 1950s around the time of touring seminal paper on morphogenesis a brilliant Russian chemist by the name of Boris belusov was beginning his own investigations into the chemistry of nature deep behind the Iron Curtain in a lab at the Soviet Ministry of Health he was beginning to investigate the way our bodies extract energy from sugars just like Turing bellusov was working on a personal project having just finished a distinguished career as a scientist in the military in his lab velusoff had formulated a mixture of chemicals to mimic one part of the process of glucose absorption in the body the mix of chemicals sat on the lab bench in front of him clear and colorless while being shaken as he mixed in the final chemical the whole solution changed color now this isn't particularly remarkable if we mix ink into water it changes color but then something happened that made no sense at all the mixture began to go clear again belusov was astounded chemicals can mix together and react but they shouldn't be able to go back on themselves to apparently unmix without intervention you can change from a clear mixture to a colored mixture fine but surely not back again and it got weirder belusov's chemicals didn't just spontaneously go into reverse they oscillated they switched back and forth from colored to clear as if they were being driven by some sort of hidden chemical metronome with meticulous care belusov repeated his experiments again and again it was the same every time his mixture would cycle from clear to colored and Back Again repeatedly he discovered something that was almost like magic a physical process that seemed to violate the laws of nature convinced he'd discovered something of great importance bellusoff wrote up his findings Keen to share his Discovery with the wider world but when he submitted his paper to a leading Russian scientific journal he received a wholly unexpected and damning response the editor of the journal told belusov that his findings in the lab were quite simply impossible they contravened the fundamental laws of physics the only explanation was that belusov had made a mistake in his experiment and the work was simply not fit for publication the rejection crushed melusov deeply insulted by the suggestion his work had been botched he abandoned his experiments soon he gave up science altogether tragic irony was that divided as they were by the Iron Curtain belusov never encountered turing's work for if he had he would have been completely Vindicated turns out that bellusov's oscillating chemicals far from contravening the laws of physics were actually a real world example of precisely the behavior turing's equations predicted [Music] while the connection might not appear obvious at First Sight other scientists showed that if you left a variation of belusov's chemicals unsturred in a Petri dish instead of Simply oscillating they self-organize into shapes in fact they go beyond touring simple blobs and Stripes to create stunningly beautiful structures and patterns out of nowhere the amazing and very unexpected thing about the Bez reaction is that someone had discovered a system which essentially reproduces the Turing equations and so from what looks like a very very Bland solution emerge these astonishing patterns of waves and Scrolls and spirals [Music] now this is emphatically not abstract science the way belushov's chemicals move as coordinated waves is exactly the way our heart cells are coordinated as they beat animal skins and heartbeats self-organization seems to operate all over the natural world so why were the scientific Community ensuring in belusov's day so uninterested or even hostile to this astonishing and beautiful idea [Music] well the reason was all too human mainstream scientists simply didn't like it to them it seemed to run counter to science and all that it had achieved [Music] to change that view would require a truly shocking and completely unexpected discovery in essence by the beginning of the 20th century scientists saw the universe as a giant complicated mechanical device kind of a super-sized version of this orery the idea was that the universe is a huge and intricate machine that obeys orderly mathematical rules if you knew the rules of how the machine was configured to start with as you turn the handle over and over again it will behave in an entirely predictable way back in the times of Isaac Newton when people were discovering the laws that drove the universe they came up with this kind of metaphor of A Clockwork Universe the universe looked like a machine which had been set going at the incident of creation and just followed the rules and ticked along and it was a complicated machine and therefore complicated things happened but once you set it going it would only do one thing and the message that people drew from this was that anything describable by mathematical rules must actually basically be fairly simple find the mathematics that describes a system and you can then predict how that system will unfold that was the big idea it began with Newton's law of gravity which can be used to predict how a planet moves around the Sun scientists soon found many other equations just like it Newtonian physics seemed like the ultimate crystal ball it held up the tantalizing possibility that the future could in principle be known the more careful your measurements are today the better you can predict what will happen tomorrow [Music] newtonianism had a dangerous consequence if a nice mathematical system that worked in a similar way to my honorary did sometimes become unpredictable scientists assumed some malign outside force was causing it perhaps dirt had got him perhaps the cogs were wearing out or perhaps someone had tampered with it basically we used to think if you saw very irregular behavior in some problem you're working on this must be the result of some sort of random outside influences it couldn't be internally generated it wasn't an intrinsic part of the problem it was some other thing impacting on it looked at from this point of view the whole idea of self-organization seemed absurd the idea that patterns of the kind Turing and bellusov had found could appear of their own accord without any outside influence was a complete taboo [Music] the only way for self-organization to be accepted was for the domineering Newtonian view to collapse but that seemed very unlikely after all by the late 60s it had delivered all the wonders of the Modern Age [Music] but then at the same time as the moon mission small group of scientists all ardent newtonians quite unexpectedly found something wasn't right not right at all during the second half of the 20th century a devil was found in the detail a devil that would ultimately shatter the Newtonian dream and plunge us literally into chaos [Music] [Applause] ironically the event that forced scientists to take self-organization seriously was the discovery of a phenomenon known as chaos chaos is one of the most overused words in English science it has a very specific meaning it says that A system that is completely described by mathematical equations is more than capable of being unpredictable without any outside interference whatsoever there's a widespread misapprehension that chaos is just somehow saying the very familiar fact that everything's complicated I mean the nitwit chaoticist in Jurassic Park was under that confusion it's something much simpler and yet much more complicated than that it says some very very simple rules or equations with nothing random in them and completely determined we know everything about the rule can have outcomes that are entirely unpredictable chaos is one of the most unwelcome discoveries in science [Music] the man who forced the scientific Community to confront it was an American meteorologist called Edward Lorenz in the early 1960s he tried to find mathematical equations that could help predict the weather like all his contemporaries he believed that in principle the weather system was no different to my honorary a mechanical system that could be described and predicted mathematically but he was wrong when Lorenz wrote down what looked like perfectly simple mathematical equations to describe the movement of air currents they didn't do what they were supposed to they made no useful predictions whatsoever it was as if the lightest breath of wind one day could make the difference a month later between a snowstorm and a perfectly sunny day how can a simple system that works in the regular Clockwork manner of my orery become unpredictable it's all down to how it's configured how the gears are connected in essence under certain circumstances the tiniest difference in the starting positions of the cogs differences that are too small to measure can get bigger and bigger with each turn of the handle with each step in the process the system then moves further and further away from where you thought it was going Lorenz captured this radical idea in an influential talk he gave called does the flap of a butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas [Music] it was a powerful and evocative image and within months a new phrase had entered our language the butterfly effect and the butterfly effect the Hallmark of all chaotic systems started turning up everywhere in the early 70s a young Australian called Robert May was investigating a mathematical equation that modeled how animal populations changed over time but here too look the dreaded Butterfly Effect immeasurably small changes to the rates at which the animals reproduced could sometimes have huge consequences on their overall population numbers could go up and down wildly for no obvious reason the idea that a mathematical equation gave you the power to predict how a system will behave was dead in some sense this is the end of the Newtonian dream when I was a graduate student the belief was as we got more and more computer power we'd be able to solve even more complicated sets of equations but this said that's not necessarily true you could have the simplest equations you can think of with nothing random in them you know everything and yet if they have behavior that gives you chaotic Solutions then you can never know the starting point accurately enough centuries of scientific certainty dissolved in just a few short years the truth of the Clockwork Universe turned out to be just an illusion something which had seemed a logical certainty revealed itself merely as an Act of Faith and what's worse the truth had been staring Us in the face all the time because chaos is everywhere seemed unpredictability was hardwired into every aspect of the world we live in the global climate could dramatically change in the course of a few short years the stock market could crash without warning we could be wiped from the face of the planet overnight and there is nothing anyone could do about it unfortunately I have to tell you that all of this is true and yet to be scared of chaos is pointless it's woven into the basic laws of physics and we really all have to accept it as a fact of life the idea of chaos really did have a big impact over a period about 20 or 30 years because it it changed the way everyone thought about what they were doing in science it changed it to the point that they forgot that they'd ever believed otherwise what chaos did was to show us that the possibilities inherent in the simple mathematics are much broader are much more General than you might imagine and so A Clockwork Universe can nonetheless behave in the rich complex way that we experience the discovery of chaos was a real turning point in the history of science as it tore down the Newtonian dream scientists began to look more favorably at touring in belusov's work on spontaneous pattern formation and perhaps more importantly as they did so they realized something truly astonishing that there was a very deep and unexpected link a truly Cosmic connection between Nature's strange power to self-organize and the chaotic consequences of the butterfly effect between them curing belusov May and Lawrence had all discovered different faces of just one really big idea they discovered that the natural world could be deeply profoundly unpredictable but the very same things that make it unpredictable also allow it to create pattern and structure Order and Chaos seems the two are more deeply linked than we could have ever imagined so how is this possible what do phenomena as apparently different as the patterns in belusov's chemicals and the weather have in common first though both systems behave in very complicated ways they are both based on surprisingly simple mathematical rules secondly these rules have a unique property a property that's often referred to as coupling or feedback to show you what I mean to show you both Order and Chaos can emerge on their own from a simple system with feedback I'm going to do what seems at first glance like a rather trivial experiment [Music] green behind me is connected up to the camera that's filming me but the camera in turn is filming me with the screen this creates a loop with multiple copies of me appearing on the screen this is a classic example of a feedback loop we get a picture in a picture in a picture at first it seems fairly predictable but as we Zoom the camera in some pretty strange things begin to happen the first thing I notice is that the object I'm filming stops bearing much resemblance to what now appears on the screen [Music] small changes in the movements of the match become rapidly Amplified as they Loop Round from the camera to the screen and back to the camera [Music] so even though I can describe each step in the process mathematically I still have no way of predicting how tiny changes in the flickering of the flame will end up in the final image this is the butterfly effect in action [Music] but now here comes the spooky bit [Music] strange and rather beautiful patterns begin to emerge the same system one that's based on Simple Rules with feedback produces Chaos and Order [Music] the same mathematics is generating chaotic behavior and patterned Behavior this changes completely how you think about all of this the idea that there are regularities in nature and then totally separately from them are irregularities and these are just two different things it's just not true these are two ends of a spectrum of behavior which can be generated by the same kind of mathematics and it's the closest thing we have at the moment to the kind of true mathematics of nature one of the great take-home messages from turing's work and from the discoveries in in chemistry and biology and so on is that ultimately pattern formation seems to be woven very very deeply into the fabric of the universe and it actually takes some very very simple and familiar processes like diffusion like the rates of chemical reactions in the interplay between them naturally gives rise to pattern so pattern is everywhere it's just waiting to happen laughs from the 70s on more and more scientists began to embrace the concept that chaos and pattern are built into Nature's most basic rules but one scientist more than any other brought a fundamentally new understanding to this astonishing and often puzzling idea foreign he was a colorful character and something of a Maverick his name is Benoit mandelbrot Benoit mandelbrot wasn't an ordinary child he skipped the first two years of school and as a Jew in war-torn Europe his education was very disrupted He was largely self-taught or tutored by relatives he never formally learned the alphabet or even multiplication beyond the five times table [Music] but like Alan Turing mandelbrotts had a gift for seeing Nature's hidden patterns he could see rules where the rest of us see Anarchy he could see form and structure where the rest of us just see a shapeless mess and above all he could see that a strange new kind of mathematics underpinned the whole of nature [Music] mandelbrot's lifelong Quest was to find a simple mathematical basis for the rough and irregular shapes of the real world mandelbrot was working for IBM and he was not in the normal academic environment and he was working on a whole pile of different problems about irregularities in nature in the financial markets all over the place and I think at some point it dawned on him that everything he was doing seemed to be really parts of the same big picture and he was a sufficiently original and unusual person that he realized that pursuing this big picture was what he really wanted to do to mandelbrot it seemed perverse that mathematicians have spent centuries contemplating idealized shapes like straight lines or perfect circles and yet had no proper or systematic way of describing the rough and imperfect shapes that dominate The Real World take this pebble is it a sphere or a cube or maybe a bit of both and what about something much bigger look at the arch behind me from a distance it looks like a semicircle but up close we see that it's bent and crooked so what shape is it mandelbront asked if there's something unique that defines all the varied shapes in nature do the fluffy surfaces of clouds the branches in trees and rivers the crinkled edges of shorelines share a common mathematical feature well they do underlying nearly all the shapes in the natural world is a mathematical principle known as self-similarity this describes anything in which the same shape is repeated over and over again at smaller and smaller scales a great example are the branches of trees they fork and Fork again repeating that simple process over and over at smaller and smaller scales the same branching principle applies in the structure of our lungs and the way our blood vessels are distributed throughout our bodies it even describes how Rivers split into ever smaller streams and nature can repeat all sorts of shapes in this way this Romanesco broccoli its overall structure is made up of a series of repeating cones at smaller and smaller scales mandelbrot realized self-similarity was the basis of an entirely new kind of geometry and he even gave it a name fractal now that's a pretty neat observation but what if you could represent this property of nature in mathematics what if you could capture its Essence to draw a picture what would that picture look like could you use a simple set of mathematical rules to draw an image that didn't look man-made the answer would come from mandelbrot who had taken a job at IBM in the late 1950s to gain access to its incredible computing power and pursue his obsession with the mathematics of nature armed with a new breed of supercomputer he began investigating a rather curious and strangely simple looking equation could be used to draw a very unusual shape what I'm about to show you is one of the most remarkable mathematical images ever discovered epic doesn't really do it justice this is the mandelbrot set it's been called the thumbprint of God and when we begin to explore it you'll understand why [Music] just as with the tree or the broccoli the closer you study this picture the more detail you see each shape within the set contains an infinite number of smaller shapes baby mandelbrots that go on forever [Music] yet all this complexity stems from just one incredibly simple equation this equation has a very important property it feeds back on itself like a video Loop each output becomes the input for the next go [Music] this feedback means that an incredibly simple mathematical equation can produce a picture of infinite complexity [Music] the really fascinating thing is that the mandelbrot set isn't just a bizarre mathematical quirk its fractal property of being similar at all scales mirrors a fundamental ordering principle in nature [Music] turing's patterns bellusov's reaction and mandelbrot's fractals are all signposts pointing to a deep underlying natural principle when we look at complexities in nature we tend to ask where do they come from there is something in our heads that says complexity does not arise out of Simplicity it must arise from something complicated we conserve complexity but what the mathematics in this whole area is telling us is that very simple rules naturally give rise to very complex objects and so if you look at the object it looks complex and you think about the rule that generates it it's simple so the same thing is both complex and simple from two different points of view and that means we have to rethink completely the relation between Simplicity and complexity complex systems can be based on Simple Rules that's the big revelation and it's an astonishing idea it seems to apply all over our world look at a flock of birds each bird obeys very simple rules but the flock as a whole does incredibly complicated things avoiding obstacles navigating the planet with no single leader or even conscious plan but amazing though this flock's behavior is it's impossible to predict how it will behave it never repeats exactly what it does even in seemingly identical circumstances [Music] it's just like the bellusov reaction each time you run it the patterns produced are slightly different they may look similar but they are never identical the same is true or video loops and sand dunes we know they'll produce a certain kind of pattern but we can't predict the exact shapes the big question is can Nature's ability to turn Simplicity into complexity in this mysterious and unpredictable way explain why life exists can it explain how a universe full of simple dust can turn into human beings how inanimate matter can spawn intelligence first you might think that this is beyond the remit of science if Nature's rules are really unpredictable should we simply give up absolutely not in fact quite the opposite fittingly the answer to this problem lies in the natural world [Music] there exists a process that Engineers these unpredictable complex systems and hones them to perform almost miraculous tasks process is called evolution Evolution has built on these patterns it's taken them as the raw ingredients it's combined them together in various ways experimented to see what works and what doesn't kept the things that do work and then built on that it's a completely unconscious process but basically that's what's happening everywhere you look you can see Evolution using Nature's self-organizing patterns our hearts use belusoft type reactions to regulate how they beat our blood vessels are organized like fractals even our brain cells interact according to Simple Rules the way Evolution refines and enriches complex systems is one of the most intriguing ideas in recent science my interest in my PhD research in complex systems was to see how complex systems interact with Evolution so on the one hand you have systems that almost organize themselves as complex systems so they exhibit order that you wouldn't expect but on the other hand you still have to have Evolution interact with that to create something that is truly adapted to the environment Evolution's mindless yet creative power to develop and shape complex systems is indeed incredible but it operates on a cosmic time scale from the first life on Earth to us walking about took in a region of three and a half billion years but we now have in our hands a device that can mimic this process on a much shorter time scale what is the invention I'm talking about well there's a good chance you've been sitting in front of one all day it is of course the computer [Music] computers today can churn through trillions of calculations per second and that gives them the power to do something very special that can simulate evolution more precisely computers can use the principles of evolution to shape and refine their own programs in the same way the natural world uses Evolution to shape and refine living organisms and today computer scientists find that this evolved software can solve problems that would be beyond the smartest of humans one thing that we found and particularly in our original research is how powerful evolution is as a as a system as an algorithm to create something that is very complex and to create something that's very adaptive Torsten and his team's goal was nothing less than to use computerized Evolution to create a virtual brain that would control a virtual body to begin with they created a hundred random brains as you can see they weren't up to much Evolution then took over the computer selected the brains that were slightly better at moving their bodies and got them to breed the algorithm then takes those individuals that do the best and it allows them to create offspring the best movers of the Next Generation were then bred together and so on and on amazingly after just 10 Generations although they are still a bit unsteady the figures could walk eventually miraculously you actually end up with something that works the slightly scary thing is you don't know why it works and how it works you look at that brain and you have no idea actually what's going on because Evolution has optimized it automatically [Music] in 20 Generations Evolution had turned this into this [Music] but these evolved computer beings soon went far beyond just walking [Music] they evolved to do things that really are impossible to program conventionally they react realistically to unexpected events like being hit or falling over even though we program these algorithms what actually then happens when it unfolds life we don't control anymore and things happen that we never expected and it's it's quite a funny feeling that you create these algorithms but then they do their own thing an unthinking process of evolutionary trial and error has created these virtual creatures that can move and react in real time [Music] what we're seeing here is fantastic experimental evidence for the creative power of systems based on Simple Rules [Music] watching how computers can unconsciously evolve programs to do things that no human could consciously program is a fantastic example of the power of self-organization it demonstrates that evolution is itself just like the other systems we've encountered one based on Simple Rules and feedback from which complexity spontaneously emerges think about it simple rule is that the organism must replicate with a few random mutations now and again the feedback comes from the environment favors the mutations that are best suited to it the result is ever increasing complexity produced without thought or design the interesting thing is that one can move up to a higher level of organization once you have organisms that actually have patterns on them these can be selected for or selected against by processes which are essentially feedbacks and so Evolution itself the whole darwinian scheme is in a sense Turing again with feedbacks happening through different processes and that's the essence of this story unthinking simple rules have the power to create amazingly complex systems without any conscious thought in that sense these computer beings are self-organized systems just like the one belusov observed happening in his chemicals just like the ones in sand dunes and the mandelbrot sets in our lungs our hearts in weather and in the geography of our planet design does not need an active interfering designer it's an inherent part of the universe [Music] one of the things that makes people sign comfortable about this idea of if you will spontaneous pattern formation is that somehow or other you don't need a Creator but perhaps a really clever designer what he would do is to kind of treat the universe like a giant simulation where you set some initial condition and just let the whole thing spontaneously happen in all of its wonder and all of its beauty the mathematics of pattern formation shows that the same kind of pattern can show up in an enormous range of different physical chemical biological systems somewhere deep down inside it's happening for the same mathematical reason implicit in those facts it's are these beautiful patterns that we see everywhere and you know this I think is is a mind-blowing thought foreign [Music] so what is the ultimate lesson we can take from all this wallets that all the complexity of the universe all its infinite richness emerges from mindless Simple Rules repeated over and over again but remember powerful though this process is it's also inherently unpredictable so although I can confidently tell you that the future will be amazing I can also say with scientific certainty that I have no idea what it holds [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Doc of the Day

Views: 410,898

Keywords: doc of the day, documentary, current affairs, history, science, education, inspiration, culture, diverse perspectives, daily dose, informative, thought-provoking, chaos theory, intelligent life, universe, dust, counterintuitive, mind-bending, radical ideas, unanswered questions, mysteries of life, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, origin of life, natural forces, cosmic evolution, scientific theory, universe creation, cosmic dust, quantum physics, theoretical physics, big bang theory

Id: fP3H75_Xg18

Length: 59min 26sec (3566 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023