Richard, It's a question of notation. Yes, you can sometimes formulate difficult problems succinctly. GoL is just another formalism in which it's possible. What does it have to do with anything?
On 10/4/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > J Storrs Hall, PhD wrote: > > 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. > > Do it then. You can start with interesting=cyclic. > > Oh, and, by the way, the widely accepted standard for what counts as a > "scientific theory" is -- as any scientist will be able to tell you -- > that it has to make its prediction without becoming larger and more > complicated than the system under study, so it goes without saying that > whatever you choose for a theory it is not allowed to simulate a massive > number of Game of Life cases and simply home in on the cyclic ones. > > Since you say you can "readily" do this, I'm sure everyone here will be > waiting with baited breath -- can we expect to see the result by Monday > morning? > > > > Richard Loosemore > > ----- > 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/?&; > -- Vladimir Nesov mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- 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=50131225-8dee8e
