But if we use the word "theory" in its minimal sense of "a language and a set of axioms", then your "to be copied so that it does the same thing" *is* a theory, albeit a different theory (or containing theory) for one that would treat the [un]copyable application over and above the act of copying. What would be interesting would be the *number* and diversity of theories validatable/executable against any given set of tokens.
On 11/30/20 3:33 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I spent a fair amount of my youth disassembling boot procedures of various > copy protection schemes. There one is given a list of numbers that > bootstrap an operating system and an application. A small portion of that > list of numbers is relevant to preventing that list of numbers from being > copied from one media to another. It wasn’t really necessary to have a > theory of the application, generally, to understand how to change the numbers > to make that list copyable. If one had no theory of a computer instruction > set or of an operating system, but was just given a disk and the goal of > copying it to get the computer to do the same thing when the copied disk was > put in to the disk drive instead of the original disk, it is possible to > learn everything that is needed to learn which numbers to change. No > oscilloscope needed, no theory of solid state physics, etc. Ok, maybe one > reference manual. Biology is the same, but without a concise reference > manual. > > > > *From:* Friam <[email protected]> *On Behalf Of > *[email protected] > *Sent:* Monday, November 30, 2020 1:25 PM > *To:* 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[email protected]> > *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world > > > > All, > > > > I feel like this relates to a discussion held during Nerd Hour at the end of > last Friday’s vfriam. I was arguing that given, say, a string of numbers, > and no information external to that string, that no AI could detect “order” > unless it already possessed a theory of what order is. I found the > discussion distressing because I thought the point was trivial but all the > smart people in the conversation were arguing against me. -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
