On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 09:23:56PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: > On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 9:13 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > > > > > > > On 4/27/2017 4:39 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > > >> > >> If t is possible to make a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number > >> generator then I think this means that a creative processes that runs in > >> sub-exponential time, should demonstrate creativity whether it uses a > >> cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators or true random > >> number generators. Otherwise, the failure to demonstrate creativity in one > >> case but not the other could be used to differentiate cryptographically > >> secure random number generators from truly random sources in sub > >> exponential time. > >> > > > > Why would you suppose it easier to distinguish creativity from > > non-creativity than random from psuedo-random? > > > If I recall correctly, the hypothesis Russell was testing was "without true > randomness, creativity is not possible". How he measured or defined > creativity, I am not sure. I think he may have been running an evolutionary > simulation. > > Jason
The work I did on this was reported at an ALife conference in 2004, so took place during 2003-4. The results were somewhat inconclusive. No signs of open-ended evolution were apparent in any of the 3 cases: pseudo-random (Mersenne Twister), cryptographically strong pseudo random (based on the Isaac generator) and entropy harvesting (HAVEGE generator, which is now found as a Linux device /dev/random). Actually, IIRC, that conference paper did not include any of the Isaac runs. There was some increase in complexity over time in all cases, maybe a little more with HAVEGE, but not statistically significant. This is to be expected - if you have a computational process generating output, then the output can be expected to grow at most logarithmically in time. This follows from the compiler theorem: for some computable process M(t), t∈N, we have K(M(t)) ≤ K(M) + K(t) where K(M) is the constant complexity of the machine, and K(t)≤log₂t (This was pointed out in a recent paper I reviewed on open ended evolution.) If, however, a random oracle is available producing r bits of information per timestep, then K(M(t)) is bounded linearly in time. If one can demonstrate genuine linear growth in complexity, then it would be a smoking gun. In the Tierra simulation, it was hard to track where all the information was going - part of it goes into creating new digital organisms, and part into the foodweb structure. I have more recently been able to quantify how much information is in the foodweb. What makes it difficult is to get an good handle on how many bits of genuine entropy HAVEGE produces over time, as it depends on how much real world interactivity there is (eg mouse/keyboard interrupts, disk seeks). It may well be the case that with my run, there is an initial burst of entropy that decays over time. One curious thing I did notice when doing the experiments was one day I connected a unix pipe to the /dev/random on another machine, and on that other machine connected a pipe back to /dev/random of the initial machine. I then wrote the generated random numbers back to disk (which were NFS shares). I though this sort of scheme might harness parallel computing to speed up entropy harvesting. What happened was that this crossover process generated million-fold increase in the production of numbers and brought the entire cluster to a screaming halt. Since this was a national research cluster, I got severely rapped over the knuckles and promised to never do it again! I have since tried doing this with some personal computer clusters, but without any significant speedup in random number generation. Maybe it requires a massive workload of parallel scientific computations to work :). Anyway, it is a question that I will return to in the next few years - I now have a completely new implementation of Tierra and the complexity analysis tools... Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
