A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
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Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#2I'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.
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#3"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 of a philosopher who happens to have made significant practical contributions to machine learning. The 'Great Programmer' is intentionally tongue-and-cheek, but for the agnostics out there, it's worth considering that regardless of what creator/process/fundamental mathematical requirement (if any) is responsible for the existence of our universe, it is unlikely that life on Earth (or perhaps in general) is relevant to It.
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#4We've just been Schmidhubered! There's also this paper from 2009 :
> "Ultimate Cognition a la Godel" http://www.brainmaster.com/software/pubs/math/Godel%20machin...
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#5Schmidhuber has forgotten to cite Leibniz. The results in this document are nothing more than a trivial corollary of the principle of metaphysical efficiency, not to mention pre-established harmony, which Leibniz has discovered the most general forms of in 1710, which encompasses not only the construction of the physical universe, but also morality. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/.
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#6I'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 have some (radically) different opinions on what would make for a useful simulation, and questions about decisions you made -- would you be open to discussing the project in abstract with people who didn't necessarily want to join yours, but have a general interest in the topic?
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#7I'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 have some (radically) different opinions on what would make for a useful simulation, and questions about decisions you made -- would you be open to discussing the project in abstract with people who didn't necessarily want to join yours, but have a general interest in the topic?
Sure, what questions do you have?
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have some (radically) different opinions on what would make for a useful simulation, and questions about decisions you made -- would you be open to discussing the project in abstract with people who didn't necessarily want to join yours, but have a general interest in the topic?
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? Similarly, hexagonal prism tiling is strange -- why not a tiling that is x, y, t symmetric?
Do you actually even want it to be "imperative" time, where you're stepping the simulation in clock cycles? Why not look for 3D universes that satisfy a set of constraints? (This might let you use a symmetric torus.)
I sort of get the lack of boundary, but why not simulate that in an "infinite" space rather than a closed one? Wouldn't this allow a more tractable simulation?
Why conservation laws? How do you plan to enact them?
If you have a discussion page, it might work better to talk about it there, since I think some of these questions get fairly involved.
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#9Schmidhuber has forgotten to cite Leibniz. The results in this document are nothing more than a trivial corollary of the principle of metaphysical efficiency, not to mention pre-established harmony, which Leibniz has discovered the most general forms of in 1710, which encompasses not only the construction of the physical universe, but also morality. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/ .
I always felt the philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz would be the best candidates for the foundation of a philosophy of computer science.
Re: A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)
#10> 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 compute arbitrary data.