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Have successfully completed tasks call home to mama. No call no work. Easy. Alan Kay and fellow minded et al. are looking at Biology and to an extent Physics a
by eternalban 7y ago
Have successfully completed tasks call home to mama. No call no work. Easy.
Alan Kay and fellow minded et al. are looking at Biology and to an extent Physics as the successful approach to pervasive computation at large.
It is the desirable feature set of the biological organism that informs that perspective: self-healing, self-regulating, regenerative systems operating in an open-ended operational context.
So that is the holy grail. Or at least one of them. Clearly biological systems can do all that. Can we do this with software? That's what Alan Kay wants us to find out.
- kstenerud 7y agoBiological systems do that because they evolve. Interactions between independent systems happen due to chance changes in some of them. But the nature of the interaction is not something controlled. Switch one bit of a genetic code and a whole bunch of behaviors change (the ultimate in side effects). This is the anti-Dijkstra; a system that cannot be fully reasoned about. What we're seeing in "successful" biological systems is survivorship bias. They are useful because the system they operate in happens to be such that their function is useful to the system (they are in a temporary equilibrium). And that system is not under anyone's control, nor can it be, because every tiny change in one component, or the environment they operate in, alters that equilibrium in ways we can't predict. But there's no controlling entity pushing biology towards a particular function, so this doesn't matter in nature. A computer system modeled after this would be by nature difficult to fathom and brittle to change.
- zubairq 7y agoYes so true
- eternalban 7y agoI was not discussing fitness. Even unfit organisms are constituted according to the same organic order as the fit specimen.