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A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
- goldenkey 10y agoI'm actually working on a project that explores the concept of information storage / movement duality to create life. https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/ https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/ Send an email to the address listed in my profile if you'd like to be a part of the project.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoI have some (radically) different opinions on what would make for a useful simulation, and questions about decisions you made -- would you be open to discussing the project in abstract with people who didn't necessarily want to join yours, but have a general interest in the topic?
- goldenkey 10y agoSure, what questions do you have?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoIn no particular order: Why Turing completeness? In particular, you're not going to be able to realize the execution of an arbitrary Turing machine, so why not restrict to a subset you can actually compute and do your modeling in that non-complete framework? I don't think you can complete the torus in x, y, t (as there's no way to close the time dimensionl, so why not use a structure that is dimensionally symmetric? Similarly, hexagonal prism tiling is strange -- why not a tiling that is x, y, t symmetric? Do you actually even want it to be "imperative" time, where you're stepping the simulation in clock cycles? Why not look for 3D universes that satisfy a set of constraints? (This might let you use a symmetric torus.) I sort of get the lack of boundary, but why not simulate that in an "infinite" space rather than a closed one? Wouldn't this allow a more tractable simulation? Why conservation laws? How do you plan to enact them? If you have a discussion page, it might work better to talk about it there, since I think some of these questions get fairly involved.
- goldenkey 10y ago1) Turing completeness is necessary for intelligent life. The Church-Turing [1] thesis initially defined turing machines in terms of what a person could do with endless paper and pencils. Effectively, we are turing machines that consume energy in order to remain stable, compute, and reproduce. We of course, are possibly more than that -- but turing completeness is a base property that seems like it should be met. With the right information storage/movement principles, any calculation should be possible, which would trivially realize turing completeness without it being contrived -- it would be natural emergence. 2) The hexagonal tessellation on the torus is just the space. Not time. Time is the standard cellular automata clock ticks, where at t+1, every cell gets replaced with a new value, atomically. Every cell's new value depends upon its 6 immediate neighbors, and itself. This is not only parallelizable but also preserves locality. 3) 3D universes can come later. They are much more complex. This universe will be built iteratively. If 2d doesn't peel out, or it seems like 3d will improve it in some way, then it's not out of the question. 4) An infinite space without gravity has issues with conservation laws. A particle can fly off into space, never interact, and basically be "lost" as an outlier. With respect to our universe, the possible topologies are infinite euclidean plane, like you mention, or a boundaryless topology so large, that it appears flat at small scales. The torus isn't being used now anyhow. Since I restarted the project, I ended up going with a flat hexagonal tessellation that wraps at the edges like an Asteroids game. It's much simpler for now. 5) Conservation laws are necessary. In our universe, the speed of light is the speed of causality - its the speed of information movement. Yet the same thing that moves at the maximum speed of the universe, also provides the potential to keep things stable and at rest. This duality between stationary and moving information is why computation can happen. Too chaotic, and computation is easy to do, but results hard to retain. Too simple, and computation is hard to do, but results easy to retain. One needs a medium ground between these two. In any case, conservation laws make sure that no information storage is lost or gained - and that is effectively conservation of energy. It keeps computation requirements linear with the initial abstraction of mass the universe is started with. Comments are welcome on the blog post. I will be putting up a github repository shortly but the code is changing very rapidly at the moment due to design decisions, so I don't wish to put it up yet -- it would just be a disservice to those interested. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing_thesis
- ozy 10y agoI like your project. I've done a life simulator myself: http://leverlabs.io/blog20160714/ http://leverlabs.io/blog20160714/ Would really want to see a simulator that allows for self copying, but does not provide that copying mechanism directly.
- goldenkey 10y agoThat's really cool. I see how you sort of built in decay through age. I think the golden information principles for emergent life are easier to find than biological ones, but of course the requirements of space, time, etc are much larger when ones' simulation is at a lower level of abstraction. It really is a question of level of emergent behavior versus level of base behavior. Even QM can be emergent from deterministic automata. [1] [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548
- ozy 10y agoI have tried a few approaches at not having the simulator provide the copying function. But so far no luck. Do you have any concrete ideas? I would suggest it needs to be a simulation in which self-organisation is possible. But also catalyzation and self-catalyzation (autocatalysis)[1]. From there it is a small step to self-copying and thus ... evolution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalysis
- goldenkey 10y agoReproduction for RNA/DNA and cells, and later multicellular life, is an emergent property of some heavy-handed universal laws. I would suggest forgetting about reproduction and focusing on principles of information storage and movement. Computation is really the cornerstone of reproduction. In any large enough space that allows computation, computers will pop up that copy themselves. By chance. They will then dominate if their resource requirements allow them to. That's the ticket. Emergent reproduction.
- ozy 10y ago
- lightlazer 10y agoSo you are going to try build the Autoverse in Permutation City? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
- goldenkey 10y agoIn some respects but consciousness is unknown with regard to it. I am defining life as intelligent computing machines that remain stable through consumption of their environment. Whether or not the life created is conscious is a deep question. Consciousness is a hard problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- lend000 10y ago"More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care. ... From the view of the Great Programmer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”." Interesting points, especially to follow up the recent 'is matter conscious?' article on HN. Schmidhuber often seems to be more of a philosopher who happens to have made significant practical contributions to machine learning. The 'Great Programmer' is intentionally tongue-and-cheek, but for the agnostics out there, it's worth considering that regardless of what creator/process/fundamental mathematical requirement (if any) is responsible for the existence of our universe, it is unlikely that life on Earth (or perhaps in general) is relevant to It.
- adjkant 10y agoI find all of this really hard to take seriously when we work on the assumption that the design of the universe could be understood by a human. Why would something so small relative to the whole assume that its thoughts were high enough to comprehend the entire universe? I love philosophy, but let's actually spend our time and energy asking questions that do have meaning, because any small meaning to us is more important than trying to do a task we are likely so ill equipped for that has no meaning to us. I can't help but read titles like this piece and link it back to the anti-political and "above it all" attitudes that technical folk often take, believing that if they just eliminate meaning, emotion, all things that humans complicate pure logic with, and apply logic in the right way that somehow it will do some good. It doesn't matter if any of this is right or wrong - it has no relevant meaning to humans. Without meaning, it's a truly pointless task.
- adrianN 10y agoSo far we're doing a decent job of understanding the design of the universe. Most things you interact with follow the rules we figured out so well that you'd be really hard pressed to find an experiment to find a difference between prediction and reality. That makes many people confident that we can figure out the missing pieces as well.
- visarga 10y agoWe've just been Schmidhubered! There's also this paper from 2009 : > "Ultimate Cognition a la Godel" http://www.brainmaster.com/software/pubs/math/Godel%20machine.pdf http://www.brainmaster.com/software/pubs/math/Godel%20machin...
- gabrielgoh 10y agoSchmidhuber has forgotten to cite Leibniz. The results in this document are nothing more than a trivial corollary of the principle of metaphysical efficiency, not to mention pre-established harmony, which Leibniz has discovered the most general forms of in 1710, which encompasses not only the construction of the physical universe, but also morality. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/.
- jonnybgood 10y agoI always felt the philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz would be the best candidates for the foundation of a philosophy of computer science.
- wu-ikkyu 10y agoLeibniz did invent binary arithmetic didn't he? And if I'm not mistaken his inspiration for it came from the I Ching, which was one of the original founding documents of ancient Chinese philosophy (i.e. yin and yang => 0 and 1).
- vecter 10y ago> It can be shown that there is no algorithm that can generate the shortest program for computing arbitrary given data on a given computer [2, 9, 1]. In particular, our physicists cannot expect to find the most compact description of our universe. This seems wrong to me. There exists no general algorithm to find the shortest program to compute arbitrary data, but we can surely find specific shortest programs to compute arbitrary data.
- tmsldd 10y agoIf you consider that our brain is a computer, then your argument isn't valid.
- vecter 10y agoPlease expand
- tmsldd 10y agoSee Marr's 3-levels hypothesis. If we "run" an algorithm able to find a program to compute arbitrary data, there must to exist that general algorithm. We (just) need to copy it and implement in silicon..
- goatlover 10y agoOur brain isn't a computer. That's the most recent metaphor we've used to try and make sense of the three pound organ in our heads.
- Underqualified 10y agoIf time doesn't matter to the Great Programmer, does efficiency ? Would He be indifferent on P vs NP or more generalized questions of that nature ?
- adpoe 10y ago42 comments right now. What a strange coincidence. Had to say it. Here it is: http://imgur.com/a/wGdGz http://imgur.com/a/wGdGz
- jamesrcole 10y agoHardly a strange coincidence. How strange is it for posts to get at least 42 comments at some stage in their existence, and for this to be one of them?
- cgio 10y agoI wonder who supplied the great programmer with the Turing machine in the first place. What separates Turing machines from mincing machines in that context? And an important premise is an implied equivalence of an infinite sequence of states with infinite states. "Before" the world creation there is not "time" per se. So how is the Turing machine, where sequence plays a pivotal role, supposed to work in that exo-time context?
- tgragnato 10y agoAristotele used to call this primum movens. > Since every change has a cause, the origin of the chain of causes and effects must be a cause without cause (first cause), which is a primary source of motion without motion. The thought is logical, but there are also cosmological theories that do not presuppose the existence of a "first unmoved mover". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology In the oscillating models, the universe follows infinite, or indefinite, self-sustaining cycles. The time may emerge only in a thermodynamic or statistical context. A sequence of events could "simply" only imply a correlation of adjacent quantum energy states.
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- jatsign 10y ago"Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers. If our own universe allowed for enough storage, enough time, and fault-free computing, then you could be one of them." Loved that line. I do not understand this main point of the article. Perhaps someone can explain? "On the other hand, computing just one particular universe’s evolution (with, say, one particular instance of noise), without computing the others, tends to be very expensive, because almost all individual universes are incompressible, as has been shown above. More is less!" It seems the point is that the program to compute all universes is short, while the program to compute one particular universe is long. But surely runtime is greater in the former?
- jrimbault 10y agoAt the beginning: > Time. The Great Programmer does not worry about computation time. Nobody presses Him.
- jatsign 10y agoOk, thought it might refer to that. So "expensive" is the length of the program and nothing else.
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- wu-ikkyu 10y ago>"Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers." This is comparable to the metaphor of Indra's Net, as described by Alan Watts: >"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."
- heydenberk 10y agoIn this vein, I strongly recommend Scott Aaronson's Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
- smikhanov 10y agoOr, for that matter his "Quantum Computing since Democritus" book. He covers some deep stuff like the presence of free will from a perspective of computational complexity theory and that is a fascinating read.