On Thursday 04 October 2007 11:06:11 am, Richard Loosemore wrote: > As far as we can tell, GoL is an example of that class of system in > which we simply never will be able to produce a "theory" in which we > plug in the RULES of GoL, and get out a list of all the patterns in GoL > that are interesting.
What do you exclude from your notion of a "theory"? If it can require evaluating a recursive function, or solving a Diophantine equation, or any of the other (provably) Turing equivalent constructs we often use to express scientific theories, then I can readily give you a theory that will take the rules, run huge numbers of experiments, do clustering and maxent type analyses, and so forth, using any definition of "interesting" you can formally specify. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=49988403-a67391
