William Pearson wrote:
2008/8/3 Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I probably don't need to labor the rest of the story, because you have heard
it before. If there is a brick wall between the overall behavior of the
system and the design choices that go into it - if it is impossible to go
from 'I want the system to behave like [that]' to 'therefore I need to make
[this] choice of design at the low level' - then all the stuff about using
intuition to sense the right design would go out the window. This is why
the conversation yesterday about what John Conway actually did when he came
up with Game of Life was so important: the documentary evidence suggests
that what he and his team did was just blind search. Other people have
tried to assert that he used mathematical intuition. The complex systems
community would say that in almost all projects like the one Conway
undertook, there would be absolutely no choice whatsoever but to do a blind
search.
Might it be worth setting people a challenge? Set people the task of
building a complex system with a certain property or maybe a few
(nothing too bad, perhaps selecting a rule number from something akin
to Wolframs numbering). They give reasons why they picked the rules
they did and see if they do better than a RNG at picking the correct
number. You appear to be going against a strong intuition here, so
giving people a practical experiment they can play on themselves might
be worthwhile.
Excellent idea.
What do you think of this? The challenge is to find a cellular
automaton that has exactly two basic "objects" ("creatures" in Game of
Life slang) that move across the plane at a regular speed. Two gliders,
in other words.
They must be different in design, with different speeds, and not derived
from one another. And (just one more requirement, if that does not seem
too unreasonable) if the CA is started off with a random initial state
on many occasions, the frequency of occurrence of the two types of
glider must converge on the ratio 7:1 (plus or minus 10%).
Finding a system in which there are more than two unique types of glider
would not count. There must be exactly two.
And it goes without saying that the interactions between cells should be
of the sort that qualifies the system as 'complex'. I know that is
difficult to define, but it would obviously be cheating to put a large
programmable engine inside each cell and have these processors
explicitly negotiate with one another to form the gliders.
(One other comment: in your above suggestion you talk about some of
Wolfram's numbered rules, but I am not quite sure how this relates.)
So there you go. As you say, the challenge is to do this and then give
reasons why the rules were picked, and also to do a comparison with
chosing rules at random.
If people find it really too difficult to get the frequency ratio, I'd
be happy enough to see just the two gliders.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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