A Quick Update on Various Projects

I’ve not posted here in a while but I’ve been busy working on various projects in the background. Here’s a quick update on my Barricelli 1954 project and also on a project to produce new editions of W. Grove’s very early novels on AI takeover from around the 1890s.

Barricelli 1954 project

I’m delighted to have assembled a team of Italian academics, writers and translators to work with me on a project to translate Nils Aall Barricelli’s first publication on his artificial life simulations. The paper, Esempi Numerici di Processi di Evoluzione, was published in the Italian journal Methodos in 1954. It is the first published work to report on computational experiments in artificial life. Despite its significance in the history of the field, copies of the paper are hard to come by.

We are translating the paper from Italian to English, and are planning on submitting it to the Artificial Life journal along with a commentary on its context, content and significance.

As part of this effort, I have rewritten Barricelli’s simulation in C++ to enable me to reproduce the figures he presented in the paper. The code and the regenerated figures are available at https://github.com/tim-taylor/barricelli54.

W. Grove novels project

The British author W. Grove wrote some of the earlier sci-fi novels on the idea of intelligent self-reproducing machines evolving to a stage where they threaten the ongoing existence of humankind (AI takeover in today’s parlance). Grove wrote two novels on this theme: A Mexican Mystery in 1888, and The Wreck of a World in 1890. The first of these is very hard to get hold of, only being held in a few libraries around the world. The latter book has been republished by the British Library, but only as a reprographic version of the original and with a very uninspiring cover.

Through my publishing imprint Enchanted Bit I am currently working on new editions of both of these books, featuring new typesetting, a new foreword and new cover art. Both books will be released in softcover and eBook editions later this year.