Fool's Experiments Read Online Free

precocious, high school-aged children. Like his two daughters. Single parenting was hard, and not his class' fault.
    AJ gazed into the video camera. "You and I will be exploring a topic that didn't even exist when your parents were your age. Mention this course to them and you will probably get an inane remark about Frankenstein." Just smirk knowingly, as I'm sure you all do so well, he thought, visions of his own teens in his mind's eye. "We're not here to discuss anything so mundane, so simple, as copy and paste with existing biological bits. Nope, no cloning or genetic engineering for us. We'll be discussing something really cutting-edge."
     
    The entity was long gone, vanished, but new beings—its spawn—had taken its place in the still-featureless void.
    The progeny of the entity still moved randomly, advancing and withdrawing. Sometimes they edged closer to the destination of which they, too, had no awareness. Often they hacked away from their goal, or vied without success against the same unseen forces that had stymied their sire. Blind reflex directed their actions, as it had that first entity's.
    Still, subtle variations distinguished the descendants from each other and from their ancestor. One attempted its moves with greater rapidity than the others, and made correspondingly faster progress. One less fortunate moved in only a single direction, soon reaching a limit beyond which invisible forces permitted no further motion. The beings and their slight distinctions numbered in the hundreds. Each embodied a unique, if insufficient, method toward solving the enigma of the void.
    Millions of motions once again passed.
    All the travelers failed, but some were more or less successful than others. One, in particular, had the capacity of retaining a single fact. Specifically, the being "knew" whether its most recent effort had been blocked by the irresistible force. If so, it tried something, anything, else for its next motion. To that degree, its actions deviated from pure randomness; it had fewer false starts than its siblings, and soon forged far ahead of the pack.
    Memory, however rudimentary, was an evolutionary advancement of the profoundest significance.
    The far voyager and its nearest competitors were selected.
     
    Video cameras panned across the remote lecture halls. "So, class, what we will be dealing with are computer programs that simulate some behavior of biological plants and animals." AJ played a game with himself as he spoke, mentally labeling the students. Here, an obvious campus jock. There, a neohippy woman. Either those were the biggest hoop earrings ever made or the Flying Wallendas were preparing for an exhibition. He found a whole roomful of button-down, dress-for-success types on what he privately considered the Intergalactic Business Machines screen.
    "A simulated plant can curl its simulated stem toward the simulated sunlight. A collection of simulated ants can cooperate to excavate a simulated colony. A simulated—" A blinking light on the podium caught AJ's eye. When he pressed the Identify button on the podium keypad, pop-up text gave a student name. "Mr. Prescott, you had a question."
    The student stared self-consciously at the camera and cleared his throat. "You keep saying 'simulated life.' Why simulated life, rather than real?"
    "That's a good question." It was one AJ had answered roughly a million times by now. Did kids even read course descriptions before they registered? He kept scanning the displays, responding on autopilot. "Life as you and I know it exists in what I'll call the physical world. That domain is unbelievably complex, full of complications that make any study of it inconvenient and inconclusive. Think how much easier it would be to understand the principles of simple machines, like pulleys and inclined planes, if there weren't any friction." The analogy earned scattered nods from across the various class sites. One especially enthusiastic nod on the main campus display