2008/6/30 Terren Suydam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Hi Will, > > --- On Mon, 6/30/08, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >The only way to talk coherently about purpose within >> the computation is to simulate self-organized, embodied >> systems. >> >> I don't think you are quite getting my system. If you >> had a bunch of >> programs that did the following >> >> 1) created new programs, by trial and error and taking >> statistics of >> variables or getting arbitrary code from the outside. >> 2) communicated with each other to try and find programs >> that perform >> services they need. >> 3) Bid for computer resources, if a program loses its >> memory resources >> it is selected against, in a way. >> >> Would this be sufficiently self-organised? If not, why not? >> And the >> computer programs would be as embodied as your virtual >> creatures. They >> would just be embodied within a tacit economy, rather than >> an >> artificial chemistry. > > It boils down to your answer to the question: how are the resources > ultimately allocated to the programs? If you're the one specifying it, via > some heuristic or rule, then the purpose is driven by you. If resource > allocation is handled by some self-organizing method (this wasn't clear in > the article you provided), then I'd say that the system's purpose is > self-defined.
I'm not sure how the system qualifies. It seems to be half way between the two definitions you gave. The programs can have special instructions in that bid for a specific resource with as much credit as they want (see my recent message replying to Vladimir Nesov for more information about banks, bidding and credit). The instructions can be removed or not done, the amount of credit bid can be changed. The credit is given to some programs by a fixed function, but they have instructions they can execute (or not) to give it to other programs forming an economy. What say you, self-organised or not? > As for embodiment, my question is, how do your programs receive input? > Embodiment, as I define it, requires that inputs are merely reflections of > state variables, and not even labeled in any way... i.e. we can't pre-define > ontologies. The embodied entity starts from the most unstructured state > possible and self-structures whatever inputs it receives. Bits and bytes from the outside world, or bits and bytes from reading other programs programing and data. No particular ontology. > That said, you may very well be doing that and be creating embodied programs > in this way... if so, that's cool because I hadn't considered that > possibility and I'll be interested to see how you fare. It is going to take a while. Virtual machine writing is very unrewarding programming. I have other things to do right now, I'll get back to the rest of the message in a bit. Will Pearson ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
