4 ms·

From what I can see, there are two (three?) things being interwoven here in a way that I find quite perplexing. First, there is a "T2 Architecture" which appea

From what I can see, there are two (three?) things being interwoven here in a way that I find quite perplexing. First, there is a "T2 Architecture" which appears to be an attempt to build a new computer architecture from scratch, including (I think) dedicated hardware that can be meshed together. Second, there is some sort of cellular automaton (I think?) that operates on a grid, and a pattern has been produced which results in that pattern reproducing. Thirdly (?), there is the rule-based grid system on which #2 is being built. I gather that these are supposed to be related somehow, but I'm not sure exactly how -- is this something where there is a simple substrate with simple rules (built on or perhaps the purpose of the T2 architecture?) with a layer of reproducing programs ("organisms") on top of it, with the goal of allowing (eventually) the ecosystem defined by a population of those "organisms" to perform computations on behalf of a user? It does not appear to be Conway's Game of Life, or at least nobody is saying that. I think a reproducing pattern would be a pretty significant accomplishment in itself. If this is some other rule-based grid system, then it seems like it's worth studying that on its own, independent of the underlying machine architecture? I wish some of these videos would just come out and say it, because for the life of me I can't tell if they (the architecture and the system and the "organism") are related or just two things happening at the same time.

gtsnexp 4y ago
Excellent point! It would be great if the author could clarify the distinction (or not) between hardware architecture and the emerging life thing going on. I am sure its there somewhere but would be great to see it in the intro video without having to navigate over hours of footage to find out.
camel-cdr 4y ago
As I understood it: The T2 tiles are "normal" microcomputers, that run a special software stack implementing the cellular automata. The tiles communicate over the connections, and essentially just act like a bigger automata grid. But the interesting part is that there is no global synchronization, and this architecture could be scaled indefinitely wide, by just adding more tiles. The impressive/hard part is creating the asynchronous automata, where each cell can only see a fixed amount of neighbors, and creating something from that. Edit: I think this video explained the general idea quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE
svnt 4y ago
> I think a reproducing pattern would be a pretty significant accomplishment in itself. Reproducing patterns are relatively common now e.g. [0], but the whole game here is artificial life, which means different things to different people, but generally self-reproduction (even with mutation) is not considered sufficient as it does not advance in complexity as life systems seem to. 0 https://archive.is/9HnBg https://archive.is/9HnBg
- andrewla 4y ago
  From reading this, it appears that the pattern is not self-replicating in the sense that it can spawn a generation of descendants. Rather it just makes a copy of itself and then dies. The pattern in the video in this article, on the other hand, can produce multiple viable offspring (although not always, as there is non-determinism). I am not aware of any such patterns in the Game of Life.
  - svnt 4y ago
    My understanding is that self-replication (whether singular as in the above article from ten years ago or multiple) in alife is a solved problem, but that it (being based in deterministic processes with pseudo-random seeding) does not lead to the continuation of the formation of diverse forms of life. The unique piece here is I believe the increased access to indeterminate state or stochasticity. I can’t speak specifically to whether those patterns exist in the game of life.
    - andrewla 4y ago
      Alife is a huge field, and systems as old as Tierra demonstrate self-replication. The concept by itself is not revolutionary, but I am not aware of any examples specifically in Conway's game of life. The question for me is more whether simpler Turing-complete rule systems can accomplish this on space-scales and time-scales that can give us insights into the nature of emergent behavior in evolved systems.
livcomp 4y ago
It is pretty confusing but what you got is about right. It's about building a whole new computational stack - hardware, software, and systems - that ditches the traditional requirement of deterministic hardware, and replaces that with a requirement for 'indefinitely scalable' hardware. So it absolutely cannot be Conway's Game of Life - though people often think it is - since GoL assumes deterministic execution (plus other issues). The basic architecture is called the Movable Feast Machine (MFM) and yes, that is a 2D cellular automata engine with a bunch of unusual details (asynchronous, large R/W neighborhood, ..). Looking downward, the T2 tiles are specific prototype hardware that implements the MFM. They could be replaced by some other tile that does the same, like x86 could be replaced with ARM given suitable software mods above. Looking upwards from the MFM, some specific cellular automaton - called a 'physics' - is implemented in a custom language called 'ulam'. The physics in the T-0 video involves some 208 ulam classes: Some deal with the 2D diamond grids, some deal with the 1D linked lists within the diamond grids, and all sorts of infrastructure classes and so on. Then on top of all that, a subset of those classes represent instructions for a 1D 'assembly language' with operations like 'extend an arm one step', 'deposit a processor node', and so forth. The 'Ancestor 1312' organism/structure/pattern demonstrated in the video is encoded in a 1D chain of those instructions that is loaded (step by step, using MFM events) into an empty diamond grid at the beginning.
- andrewla 4y ago
  Thanks so much for the reply! This clears a lot up, and I'm happy to see that my basic understand was not too far off. I don't completely buy into the notion that this needs to be soup-to-nuts; that the T2 / MFM / Ulam stack is a necessarily the right way forward. But I think that what I see as the core insight -- that determinism and synchronicity is the deep rot at the core of our understanding of how to build distributed systems -- is true beyond all reasonable doubt. The idea of evolving (literally or figuratively) self-healing systems and components is I think at the core of the future of computer science. And the dirty secret of all distributed systems of significant scale is that they have already escaped the attempt to confine them -- operational complexity has become a matter of botany, but without any insights or tools to help us deal with the actual complexity, but instead applying layers of attempts to reduce complexity that usually just end up reducing the legibility of the system.

gtsnexp 4y ago

Excellent point! It would be great if the author could clarify the distinction (or not) between hardware architecture and the emerging life thing going on. I am sure its there somewhere but would be great to see it in the intro video without having to navigate over hours of footage to find out.

camel-cdr 4y ago

As I understood it: The T2 tiles are "normal" microcomputers, that run a special software stack implementing the cellular automata. The tiles communicate over the connections, and essentially just act like a bigger automata grid. But the interesting part is that there is no global synchronization, and this architecture could be scaled indefinitely wide, by just adding more tiles. The impressive/hard part is creating the asynchronous automata, where each cell can only see a fixed amount of neighbors, and creating something from that. Edit: I think this video explained the general idea quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE

svnt 4y ago

> I think a reproducing pattern would be a pretty significant accomplishment in itself. Reproducing patterns are relatively common now e.g. [0], but the whole game here is artificial life, which means different things to different people, but generally self-reproduction (even with mutation) is not considered sufficient as it does not advance in complexity as life systems seem to. 0 https://archive.is/9HnBg https://archive.is/9HnBg

andrewla 4y ago
From reading this, it appears that the pattern is not self-replicating in the sense that it can spawn a generation of descendants. Rather it just makes a copy of itself and then dies. The pattern in the video in this article, on the other hand, can produce multiple viable offspring (although not always, as there is non-determinism). I am not aware of any such patterns in the Game of Life.
- svnt 4y ago
  My understanding is that self-replication (whether singular as in the above article from ten years ago or multiple) in alife is a solved problem, but that it (being based in deterministic processes with pseudo-random seeding) does not lead to the continuation of the formation of diverse forms of life. The unique piece here is I believe the increased access to indeterminate state or stochasticity. I can’t speak specifically to whether those patterns exist in the game of life.
  - andrewla 4y ago
    Alife is a huge field, and systems as old as Tierra demonstrate self-replication. The concept by itself is not revolutionary, but I am not aware of any examples specifically in Conway's game of life. The question for me is more whether simpler Turing-complete rule systems can accomplish this on space-scales and time-scales that can give us insights into the nature of emergent behavior in evolved systems.

livcomp 4y ago

It is pretty confusing but what you got is about right. It's about building a whole new computational stack - hardware, software, and systems - that ditches the traditional requirement of deterministic hardware, and replaces that with a requirement for 'indefinitely scalable' hardware. So it absolutely cannot be Conway's Game of Life - though people often think it is - since GoL assumes deterministic execution (plus other issues). The basic architecture is called the Movable Feast Machine (MFM) and yes, that is a 2D cellular automata engine with a bunch of unusual details (asynchronous, large R/W neighborhood, ..). Looking downward, the T2 tiles are specific prototype hardware that implements the MFM. They could be replaced by some other tile that does the same, like x86 could be replaced with ARM given suitable software mods above. Looking upwards from the MFM, some specific cellular automaton - called a 'physics' - is implemented in a custom language called 'ulam'. The physics in the T-0 video involves some 208 ulam classes: Some deal with the 2D diamond grids, some deal with the 1D linked lists within the diamond grids, and all sorts of infrastructure classes and so on. Then on top of all that, a subset of those classes represent instructions for a 1D 'assembly language' with operations like 'extend an arm one step', 'deposit a processor node', and so forth. The 'Ancestor 1312' organism/structure/pattern demonstrated in the video is encoded in a 1D chain of those instructions that is loaded (step by step, using MFM events) into an empty diamond grid at the beginning.

andrewla 4y ago
Thanks so much for the reply! This clears a lot up, and I'm happy to see that my basic understand was not too far off. I don't completely buy into the notion that this needs to be soup-to-nuts; that the T2 / MFM / Ulam stack is a necessarily the right way forward. But I think that what I see as the core insight -- that determinism and synchronicity is the deep rot at the core of our understanding of how to build distributed systems -- is true beyond all reasonable doubt. The idea of evolving (literally or figuratively) self-healing systems and components is I think at the core of the future of computer science. And the dirty secret of all distributed systems of significant scale is that they have already escaped the attempt to confine them -- operational complexity has become a matter of botany, but without any insights or tools to help us deal with the actual complexity, but instead applying layers of attempts to reduce complexity that usually just end up reducing the legibility of the system.