On 9/3/13, Casey Ransberger <[email protected]> wrote: ... > On Sep 3, 2013, at 3:04 PM, David Barbour <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Even better if the languages are good for exploration by genetic >> programming - i.e. easily sliced, spliced, rearranged, mutated. > > I've only seen this done with two languages. Certainly it's possible in any > language with the right "semantic chops" but so far it seems like we're > looking at Lisp (et al) and FORTH. > > My observation has been that the main quality that yields (ease of > recombination? I don't even know what it is for sure) is "syntaxlessness." > > I'd love to know about other languages and qualities of languages that are > conducive to this sort of thing, especially if anyone has seen interesting > work done with one of the logic languages.
There is a (the?) universal logical notation being elucidated right now that seems to me to be very promising for this sort of stuff. It is extremely simple yet very powerful (elegant) and it renders logic, circuits, and prolog-ish automated reasoning in a straightforward manner. The roots of it go back to the later work of Charles Sanders Peirce, and was first written up in the iconoclastic "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form Several people have been working with it: http://lawsofform.org/people.html See especially: http://markability.net/ http://www.boundary.org/bi/index.html http://www.lawsofform.org/ http://www.boundarymath.org/ http://wbricken.com/ http://iconicmath.com/ I'm interested in it for three reasons: 1) It reveals interesting aspects of logical thought. 2) It's extremely easy to teach and learn. 3) I suspect it will be ideal for e.g. Gödel Machines. Warm regards, ~Simon -- http://twitter.com/SimonForman My blog: http://firequery.blogspot.com/ Also my blog: http://calroc.blogspot.com/ "The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity." --H. P. Wells, "A Short History of the World" _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
