Nils Aall Barricelli

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Nils Aall Barricelli
Born(1912-01-24)24 January 1912
Rome, Italy
Died27 January 1993(1993-01-27) (aged 81)
NationalityNorwegian-Italian
OccupationMathematician

Nils Aall Barricelli (24 January 1912 – 27 January 1993) was a Norwegian-Italian mathematician.

Biography

Nils Aall Barricelli was born on 24 January 1912, in Rome. When he was a student at the

Fulbright Scholarship.[1][2] He wrote a short biography in the application:[2]

In 1932 I passed the Italian Artium examination (classical line), and in 1936 the Italian graduation in Mathematical and physical sciences. In 1936 I settled in Norway where I have been working with scientific researches in theoretical statistics and stationary time series ... [and the] mathematical theory of evolution. ... Since 1947 I have been Assistant Professor at the University of Oslo.

Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote him a recommendation letter for John von Neumann.[1]

Barricelli's early computer-assisted experiments[3][4] in symbiogenesis and evolution are considered pioneering in artificial life research. Barricelli, who was independently wealthy, held an unpaid residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1953, 1954, and 1956. In Princeton, he worked with John von Neumann, by whom he was never academically recognised, nonetheless he worked at von Neumann's IAS machine.[5][1][6][7]

George Dyson described Barricelli's first experiments at Princeton:[8]

At 10:38 p.m. on March 3, 1953, in a one-story brick building at the end of Olden Lane in Princeton, New Jersey, Italian-Norwegian mathematical biologist Nils Aall Barricelli inoculated a 5-kilobyte digital universe with random numbers generated by drawing playing cards from a shuffled deck. "A series of numerical experiments are being made with the aim of verifying the possibility of an evolution similar to that of living organisms taking place in an artificially created universe," he announced.

He later worked at the

space flight, theoretical physics and mathematical language.[9]

Legacy

Barricelli is mostly forgotten,[1][10] though he is sometimes called the "Father of Digital Life".[1] He is recognised as a first person who programmed the first genetic algorithm,[11] and published "perhaps the earliest published record of an evolutionary simulation" in 1954.[10]

He is featured in

Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC.[12]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Hackett, Robert (30 May 2014). "Meet the Father of Digital Life". Nautilus. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  2. ^ a b c Galloway, Alexander R. "Creative Evolution | Alexander R. Galloway". cabinetmagazine.org. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  3. ^ Barricelli, Nils Aall (1954). "Esempi numerici di processi di evoluzione". Methodos. 6: 45–68.
  4. S2CID 124273411
    .
  5. ^ "Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study - Ideas | Institute for Advanced Study". www.ias.edu. 30 June 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  6. ^ Dyson, George. 1997. Darwin Among the Machines. Reading, MA: Helix Books, p. 111
  7. ^ Dyson, George. 2012. Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Pantheon Books, Chapter 6, p. 225
  8. ^ "An Artificially Created Universe - Ideas | Institute for Advanced Study". www.ias.edu. 3 May 2012. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  9. ^ "THE REALITY CLUB Darwin Among the Machines Or, The Origins of Artificial Life A Presentation by George Dyson". edge.org. Archived from the original on 27 May 2012. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  10. ^
    doi:10.1109/MCI.2006.1597062
    . Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  11. ISBN 978-1-118-65950-2
    . Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  12. ^ Donaldson, Emily (6 October 2023). "With The MANIAC, author Benjamin Labatut dives into the path of madness". The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on 8 Oct 2023. Retrieved 3 January 2024.

External links


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