Virtual Memory - Bryant McGill

# Virtual Memory **Entity class:** Concept or analytic term > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this node within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Computing / Digital Ecology **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition Virtual memory abstracts memory addresses from physical hardware, allowing processes to operate within managed address spaces. ## Nexus Context Avida places digital organisms in protected memory regions, while Tierra uses shared memory. That architectural difference changes which interactions and parasitic strategies are possible. ## Evidence Boundary Memory isolation is ecological and governance design. It can constrain interactions without making a system independent of physical hardware or operators. ## Relationships [[wiki/Avida|Avida]], [[wiki/Tierra|Tierra]], [[wiki/Artificial Ecology|Artificial Ecology]], [[wiki/Operational Substrate|Operational Substrate]]  This entry's documented connections are expressed in its definition and related-work routes, with provenance retained in the source-linked material.  ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "The modern Internet has achieved much of what Ted Nelson articulated decades ago in his vision of the Xanadu project or Doug Englebart in his human augmentation vision at SRI. Nearly all useful knowledge is now accessible instantaneously from much of the world. Our effective personal memories are now vastly larger, essentially infinite. Our identity is embedded in what we know. And how I think is an expression of that identity. For me the Internet has led over time to that deep sense of collaboration, awareness and ubiquitous knowledge that means that my thought processes are not bound by the meat machine that is my brain, nor my locality nor my time." > **— Peter Schwartz**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?”* [[reminders/Digital Life/Thought Can Extend Beyond Brain Place and Time by Peter Schwartz|Thought Can Extend Beyond Brain Place and Time by Peter Schwartz]] ## Sources / Provenance - Operating-systems texts; Avida and Tierra system descriptions. ## Related Work in the Corpus  - In [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]], **IX. Two thousand adapters on one GPU** provides the narrative context for **Virtual Memory**: S-LoRA is a serving system built for the situation where one base model has spawned a large population of adapters.