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I'm actually working on a project that explores the concept of information storage / movement duality to create life. https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/ Send an email to the address listed in my profile if you'd like to be a part of the project.
Would really want to see a simulator that allows for self copying, but does not provide that copying mechanism directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, what questions do you have?
In no particular order: Why Turing completeness? In particular, you're not going to be able to realize the execution of an arbitrary Turing machine, so why not restrict to a subset you can actually compute and do your modeling in that non-complete framework? I don't think you can complete the torus in x, y, t (as there's no way to close the time dimensionl, so why not use a structure that is dimensionally symmetric?…
2) The hexagonal tessellation on the torus is just the space. Not time. Time is the standard cellular automata clock ticks, where at t+1, every cell gets replaced with a new value, atomically. Every cell's new value depends upon its 6 immediate neighbors, and itself. This is not only parallelizable but also preserves locality.
3) 3D universes can come later. They are much more complex. This universe will be built iteratively. If 2d doesn't peel out, or it seems like 3d will improve it in some way, then it's not out of the question.
4) An infinite space without gravity has issues with conservation laws. A particle can fly off into space, never interact, and basically be "lost" as an outlier. With respect to our universe, the possible topologies are infinite euclidean plane, like you mention, or a boundaryless topology so large, that it appears flat at small scales. The torus isn't being used now anyhow. Since I restarted the project, I ended up going with a flat hexagonal tessellation that wraps at the edges like an Asteroids game. It's much simpler for now.
5) Conservation laws are necessary. In our universe, the speed of light is the speed of causality - its the speed of information movement. Yet the same thing that moves at the maximum speed of the universe, also provides the potential to keep things stable and at rest. This duality between stationary and moving information is why computation can happen. Too chaotic, and computation is easy to do, but results hard to retain. Too simple, and computation is hard to do, but results easy to retain. One needs a medium ground between these two. In any case, conservation laws make sure that no information storage is lost or gained - and that is effectively conservation of energy. It keeps computation requirements linear with the initial abstraction of mass the universe is started with.
Comments are welcome on the blog post. I will be putting up a github repository shortly but the code is changing very rapidly at the moment due to design decisions, so I don't wish to put it up yet -- it would just be a disservice to those interested.
"More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care. ... From the view of the Great Programmer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”." Interesting points, especially to follow up the recent 'is matter conscious?' article on HN. Schmidhuber often seems to be more…
I love philosophy, but let's actually spend our time and energy asking questions that do have meaning, because any small meaning to us is more important than trying to do a task we are likely so ill equipped for that has no meaning to us.
I can't help but read titles like this piece and link it back to the anti-political and "above it all" attitudes that technical folk often take, believing that if they just eliminate meaning, emotion, all things that humans complicate pure logic with, and apply logic in the right way that somehow it will do some good. It doesn't matter if any of this is right or wrong - it has no relevant meaning to humans. Without meaning, it's a truly pointless task.
I'm actually working on a project that explores the concept of information storage / movement duality to create life. https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/ Send an email to the address listed in my profile if you'd like to be a part of the project.
I like your project. I've done a life simulator myself: http://leverlabs.io/blog20160714/ Would really want to see a simulator that allows for self copying, but does not provide that copying mechanism directly.
I think the golden information principles for emergent life are easier to find than biological ones, but of course the requirements of space, time, etc are much larger when ones' simulation is at a lower level of abstraction. It really is a question of level of emergent behavior versus level of base behavior. Even QM can be emergent from deterministic automata. [1]
"More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care. ... From the view of the Great Programmer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”." Interesting points, especially to follow up the recent 'is matter conscious?' article on HN. Schmidhuber often seems to be more…
I find all of this really hard to take seriously when we work on the assumption that the design of the universe could be understood by a human. Why would something so small relative to the whole assume that its thoughts were high enough to comprehend the entire universe? I love philosophy, but let's actually spend our time and energy asking questions that do have meaning, because any small meaning to us is more impor…
> It can be shown that there is no algorithm that can generate the shortest program for computing arbitrary given data on a given computer [2, 9, 1]. In particular, our physicists cannot expect to find the most compact description of our universe. This seems wrong to me. There exists no general algorithm to find the shortest program to compute arbitrary data, but we can surely find specific shortest programs to compu…
> It can be shown that there is no algorithm that can generate the shortest program for computing arbitrary given data on a given computer [2, 9, 1]. In particular, our physicists cannot expect to find the most compact description of our universe. This seems wrong to me. There exists no general algorithm to find the shortest program to compute arbitrary data, but we can surely find specific shortest programs to compu…
If you consider that our brain is a computer, then your argument isn't valid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you consider that our brain is a computer, then your argument isn't valid.
Please expand
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like your project. I've done a life simulator myself: http://leverlabs.io/blog20160714/ Would really want to see a simulator that allows for self copying, but does not provide that copying mechanism directly.
That's really cool. I see how you sort of built in decay through age. I think the golden information principles for emergent life are easier to find than biological ones, but of course the requirements of space, time, etc are much larger when ones' simulation is at a lower level of abstraction. It really is a question of level of emergent behavior versus level of base behavior. Even QM can be emergent from determinis…
I would suggest it needs to be a simulation in which self-organisation is possible. But also catalyzation and self-catalyzation (autocatalysis)[1]. From there it is a small step to self-copying and thus ... evolution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In no particular order: Why Turing completeness? In particular, you're not going to be able to realize the execution of an arbitrary Turing machine, so why not restrict to a subset you can actually compute and do your modeling in that non-complete framework? I don't think you can complete the torus in x, y, t (as there's no way to close the time dimensionl, so why not use a structure that is dimensionally symmetric?…
1) Turing completeness is necessary for intelligent life. The Church-Turing [1] thesis initially defined turing machines in terms of what a person could do with endless paper and pencils. Effectively, we are turing machines that consume energy in order to remain stable, compute, and reproduce. We of course, are possibly more than that -- but turing completeness is a base property that seems like it should be met. Wit…
2,3) Your structure is 2+1D, which is a kind of 3D. Comments about 3D objects were talking about spacetime regions, not space region.
2b) Do you want locality? I'm not convinced spatial locality is how our universe operates. Also, non-locality in Minecraft interacting with the update engine is what caused a lot of seemingly non-deterministic effects. I guess it makes simulating easier, though.
4) Asteroids is a torus, just a flat torus. I had actually assumed that's what you meant in the first place. (Also, you left out hyperbolic spaces.)