DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
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DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
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Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#2TL;DR: Dwarf Fortress fan learns about DNA from popular science articles, forms comprehensively superficial theory of life, the universe and everything, based on analogy to computer code and his estimation that nothing could be more complex than Dwarf Fortress.
I've never really thought a quote from an Adam Sandler movie was one to be repeated, but "Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." Bonus: it does double duty summarizing the US presidential debates.
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#3I don't for a moment believe that Dwarf Fortress contains a true 10MB of irreducibly complex behavioural code. Rather this is simply an indication that our computer languages and compression systems are much less efficient than what nature uses for DNA.
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#4simulating complex behavior requires at least 10mb of data
The author has not shown that that much is required. At most, the author has shown that it has been done with that much. Seeing as having only thousands of states is apparently enough to make a Turing machine's behavior independent of ZFC (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2725), I really doubt this "10 megabyte" lower bound.
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#5TL;DR: Dwarf Fortress fan learns about DNA from popular science articles, forms comprehensively superficial theory of life, the universe and everything, based on analogy to computer code and his estimation that nothing could be more complex than Dwarf Fortress. I've never really thought a quote from an Adam Sandler movie was one to be repeated, but "Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiot…
That's a bit harsh. The analogy made is not an uncommon one, but that doesn't mean there isn't some merit to the idea. I appreciate that people are at least trying to learn new things and form their own ideas.
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#6I don't for a moment believe that Dwarf Fortress contains a true 10MB of irreducibly complex behavioural code. Rather this is simply an indication that our computer languages and compression systems are much less efficient than what nature uses for DNA.
I don't think that is very surprising - after all, nature literally had billions of years optimizing the ___ out of DNA and how it encodes (among other things) behavior.
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#7What's vastly different between software instructions in dwarf fortress vs DNA is what actually computes the code. There is a negligible amount of complexity in made-made computers vs what goes on in a cell. There are layers upon layers of complexity that goes from genotype to phenotype.
I am a bioinformatician with a genetics background. I've always had this abstract overview of DNA as a highly compressed dataset and geneticists are essentially trying to figure out the encoding.
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#8I think the author vastly overestimates the amount of information required to encode complex behaviours.
In general, the minimum number of bits/base-pairs required to encode some behaviour (i.e. the length of the shortest program which exhibits that behaviour) is uncomputable, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
From an empirical point of view, evolution can't plan ahead and doesn't care about modularity (or at least, such things are higher-level effects which aren't directly selected for). It progresses via massively parallel monte carlo search, rather than "improving" a single individual. This is very different to most software development practices, and would tend to result in much more compact (genetic or computer) code.
The results of our software development practices are incredibly bloated compared to products of evolution. 10MB for an artifact like Dwarf Fortress is huge; we would likely make very significant gains if we compressed it using a superoptimiser (as long as we ignore petty issues like the heat-death of the Universe!).
The advantage our practices have over evolution by natural selection is that they're much faster. Our software is intelligently designed by programmers, who can think ahead about what features or changes might be useful and make specific, targetted changes to the code to bring them about. The redundancy, modularity, structure, separation-of-concerns, etc. which we strive for in our software facilitates this process.
Wikipedia says Dwarf Fortress has been around since 2002. Even if evolution were 'guided' towards such a thing, we would never expect it to come up with such a program in mere decades (although it can certainly make measurable optimisations, and small-but-important changes such as drug resistance).
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#9TL;DR: Dwarf Fortress fan learns about DNA from popular science articles, forms comprehensively superficial theory of life, the universe and everything, based on analogy to computer code and his estimation that nothing could be more complex than Dwarf Fortress. I've never really thought a quote from an Adam Sandler movie was one to be repeated, but "Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiot…
That's a bit harsh. The analogy made is not an uncommon one, but that doesn't mean there isn't some merit to the idea. I appreciate that people are at least trying to learn new things and form their own ideas.
I mean, I thought it was an interesting read, although I immediately recognized it was not a scholarly publication in any way (even with his "formal theory")
Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism
#10Kind of strange that there's no mention of actual behavioral genomics research here. Aside from the quip that:
> Scientists have found some genetic code that contributes to hereditary behaviors, but the bulk of it is unlikely to ever be found. Why? Because it plainly does not fit.
This is plainly not true. We've found lots of evidence for the genomic basis of hereditary behaviors. See Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis for example - plenty of statistical research is out there.