On 10/4/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> All understood. Remember, though, that the original reason for talking
> about GoL was the question: Can there ever be a scientific theory that
> predicts all the "interesting creatures" given only the rules?
>
> The question of getting something to recognize the existence of the
> patterns is a good testbed, for sure.
Given finite rules about a finite world with an en effectively
unlimited resource, it seems that every "interesting creature" exists
as the subset of all permutations minus the noise that isn't
interesting. The problem is in a provable definition of interesting
(which was earlier defined for example as 'cyclic') Also, who is
willing to invest unlimited resource to exhaustively search a "toy"
domain? Even if there were parallels that might lead to formalisms
applicable in a larger context, we would probably divert those
resources to other tasks. I'm not sure this is a bad idea. Perhaps
our human attention span is a defense measure against wasting life's
resources on searches that promise fitness without delivering useful
results.
In the case of RSI, the rules are not fixed. I wouldn't dare call
them mathematical infinite, but an evolving ruleset probably should be
considered functionally unlimited. I imagine Incompleteness applies
here, even if I don't know how to explicitly state it. I believe
finding "all" of the interesting creatures is nearly impossible.
Finding "an" interesting creature should be possible given a
sufficiently exact definition of interesting. After some amount of
search, the results probably have to be expressed as a confidence
metric like, "given an exhaustive search of only 10% of the known
region, there we found N number of candidates that match the criteria
within X degree of freedom. By assessment of the distribution of
candidates in the searched space, extrapolation suggests there may be
{prediction formula result} 'interesting creatures' in this universe"
the Drake equation is an example of this kind of answer/function.
Ironic that it's purpose is to determine the number of intelligences
in our own universe. Of course Fermi paradox, testable hypothesis,
etc. etc. - the point is not about whether GoL searches or SETI
searches are any more or less productive than each other. My interest
is in how intelligences of any origin (natural human brains,
human-designed CPU, however improbable aliens) manage to find common
symbols in order to create/exchange/consume ideas. If we have this
difficulty communicating with each other given the shared KB of
classes (archetypes?) of human existence, how likely is it that we
will even recognize non-human intelligence if/when we encounter it?
-----
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=50221522-7d52f7
