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At the beginning, it looked like this was headed for Wolfram land. Wolfram has the idea that, down at the bottom, the universe is a cellular automaton, like the

At the beginning, it looked like this was headed for Wolfram land. Wolfram has the idea that, down at the bottom, the universe is a cellular automaton, like the Life game. He's done a lot of work on that, but hasn't reached any connection with the physical universe. But no. It's off into early Turing and von Neumann land, which is more philosophical than useful.

ggm 2y ago
Sorry.. you're drawing a distinction between modelling the world as cellular automota, turing machines, and Von Neumann architectures? Some cellular automota (not all I read) are turing complete. Von Neumann architectures are definitionally turing complete. It's turtles all the way down.
theGnuMe 2y ago
Wolfram talks about Turing machines in his book. They are interesting in that they produce similar complicated behavior. Using the brainf*ck language is interesting to us though because we can read the language to understand what is going on and reason about it... that is way better than just applying logical operations on cells... that is a step above what Wolfram has done in my opinion... it is sort of hinted at by mathematical equations and arithmetic computations (which Wolfram also discusses)... Also the article discusses CA, just more fancy and see the same behavior: >Alex Mordvintsev created a two-dimensional bff-like environment where each of a 200×200 array of “pixels” contains a tape, and interactions occur only between neighboring tapes on the grid. The tapes are interpreted as instructions for the iconic Zilog Z80 microprocessor, launched in 1976 and used in many 8-bit computers over the years (including the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Osborne 1, and TRS-80). Here, too, complex replicators soon emerge out of the random interactions, evolving and spreading across the grid in successive waves. This is amazing. I think the next step is to build a compiler that compiles into cellular automata.

ggm 2y ago

Sorry.. you're drawing a distinction between modelling the world as cellular automota, turing machines, and Von Neumann architectures? Some cellular automota (not all I read) are turing complete. Von Neumann architectures are definitionally turing complete. It's turtles all the way down.

theGnuMe 2y ago

Wolfram talks about Turing machines in his book. They are interesting in that they produce similar complicated behavior. Using the brainf*ck language is interesting to us though because we can read the language to understand what is going on and reason about it... that is way better than just applying logical operations on cells... that is a step above what Wolfram has done in my opinion... it is sort of hinted at by mathematical equations and arithmetic computations (which Wolfram also discusses)... Also the article discusses CA, just more fancy and see the same behavior: >Alex Mordvintsev created a two-dimensional bff-like environment where each of a 200×200 array of “pixels” contains a tape, and interactions occur only between neighboring tapes on the grid. The tapes are interpreted as instructions for the iconic Zilog Z80 microprocessor, launched in 1976 and used in many 8-bit computers over the years (including the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Osborne 1, and TRS-80). Here, too, complex replicators soon emerge out of the random interactions, evolving and spreading across the grid in successive waves. This is amazing. I think the next step is to build a compiler that compiles into cellular automata.