Welcome to my graduation presentation. I will tell you about Machemes. In the meantime you probably wonder if ‘Machemes’ is a misspelling or some important word you don’t know.

This is a twitter-account. It is this kind of account you are dreaming of. Its tweets contain entertaining links and it is giving interesting opinions. Every day it gets more friends, with whom it is discussing intelligent things. I never saw someone put so much effort in twitter, reacting to every single tweet and posting so much things I did not see before. It is impressive how fast he knows what is occurring. When I send him a message, he alway replies with something valuable. It is not possible this is just one human. Are it more people together? Or is it a computer? If it is a computer, how have they written this program?

Is the twitter-account an unrealistic future visions? Impossible to make? Or is it just much work but after that we have a twitter-account that fluently uses the english syntax and semantics and an airplane that never crashes? Or has it something to do with evolution?
Because I don’t believe in impossibilities and I don’t like ‘a lot of work’ we are going to look into Evolved technology.

As mentioned several times already today: evolution can be summarized with these three words: Variation, Selection and Replication. If we have variation, selection and replication, we must have evolution.

Today we have heard about genes by Lola, we have heard about memes by Arie, I will now introduce a third replicator, ‘machemes’. Machemes came in existence after memes had build themselves new vehicles. Where they first only had humans in which they could exist, they have build themselves books, websites, cd’s, radio-waves, etc. Some of these vehicles had the possibility not only to cary, but also to copy. The information that is stored in these vehicles (other than humans) and can be copied will I call Machemes.
Previously, information in books was called memes. All ideas, wether they exist in the human brain or on a paper, were considered memes. I now say that only the ideas that exist in your brain are memes. The information in books, on cds, on the internet, will I call machemes.
Why do I separate machemes from memes? I think they have one important difference: Machemes do not disappear if you forget them, they have their own environment in which they can exist and are not dependent on the human brain like memes. For example: when everybody in the world has forgotten how the ABC-formula works, it is still in a book but in nobodies brain, it is not a meme anymore. It now is a macheme. This macheme can of course become a meme again if someone read this formula and this formula stays in this someones brain, but if it doesn’t, it stays a macheme.

Memes versus machemes, the most important difference is that machemes do not disappear if everyone has forgotten about them.
An other difference is the speed of replication. If these machemes can, like memes, also replicate themselves, they will be much faster. Genes can only be transmitted from parent to child. This is by nature a very slow process. Memes can be transmitted between any two individuals and already is much faster. Machemes can be transmitted via technology all over the world which is obviously the fastest of the three.
The quality of the copy of the replicator is also different: A gene can make an almost perfect copy. For a meme this is much more difficult: every individual’s version of an idea or belief will be in some respect different from the others. The quality of the copy of machemes is higher: by copying something digital you will not lose information. The information is just stored elsewhere.

I have searched for machemes and of course I found a lot. Due to my definition, books, cd’s, and all these vehicles which cary information, understandable or not, the machemes were all around me. More interesting of course was the question if machemes can replicate themselves, how these replicating machemes look, and if i can find some of these, how they replicate.

One of the first things, when you think of replicating information and technology, is probably
A-Life, Artificial Life. In artificial life, they have tried to program an emergent system, with or without an evolutionary algorithm.
Even though these projects have contributed a great deal to the understanding evolutionary processes, they do not yield true open ended evolution like we experience in nature. The routines used for variation, selection and reproduction were hard-coded by the research team, which often made it possible to predict – a priori – the results of a given set of parameters. With open ended evolution, adversely, you cannot predict the results.

Thinking of contemporary machemes, the social networks were the always returning examples I found. On these social networks is much information that transformed from meme to macheme.

In software it is much easier than in hardware to search for things that have something to do with replication and evolution. In hardware I found two interesting projects. First the replicating lamps of Lola, you have already listened to. This project has a programmed evolutionary algorithm inside, like the artificial life projects.
Another example of a project that do reproduction is the Reprap, an open source 3D printer. There is no evolutionary component built-into this device. However, since it is a 3D plastic printer, and most of it’s parts are made of plastic, the RepRap can print itself.

As research environment I have used Twitter. Twitter is a social network and micro blog-service. Users write tweets; messages of 140 or less characters. These tweets are added to your timeline. At the same time you can read other peoples timelines by following them, which will effectively merge your timeline with theirs. You can reply to someones tweet and you can re-tweet (repeat) someone. People that subscribe to your account are your followers.

I want to create machemes on twitter, because: the rules of a social network like Twitter force machemes to mimic the behavior of humans, so it is easy to follow their activities. In a macheme- controlled network it will be much more difficult to see what the machemes are doing or posting since it is unlikely that they are communicating in a manner that is understandable to us. Social networks also offer the possibility to study meme-macheme transmission since it is a place where memes can become machemes and vice versa.

While trying to understand what a macheme can be, I created bots. This is one of them, the nachten bot. The nachten-bot is saying goodnight every half hour. He picks a random tweet, repeats it and suffix it with a hashtag. The Goedenacht-Bot says goodnight to people that are going to bed.
The reactions are funny. See people are not amused the bot knows their name. They probably forget they filled it in in their profile themselves. Hoerajarig is saying things about birthdays and congratulates people. He is not the most smart bot, because he is filtering tweets only using the word ‘jarig’, which is an ambiguous Dutch word. I noticed the Dutch used more discourtesies than than other people.
Groups of bots, talking with each-other, talking with people and talking with other bots.

One bot did not gather any followers and did not appear in twitter search results: the God-Bot. This bot only talks about God, saying both holy and profane things. His outspoken profanity has probably made Twitter’s filtering machemes decide not to make his tweets public.