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DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

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Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#21

Post by fraytormenta »

ma1069 wrote: post #17

I don't believe it's a fair comparison... modern CPUs can run, by definition, a pretty basic range of operations, and every intent has to be encoded in a extremely complex sequence of commands. Given a certain CPU architecture and a certain algorithm to implement, someone might be able to properly infer the expected size of a compiled binary. But, by pushing the concept to the absurd, one day we might build a super-s…

The "super-CPU" that you have described has to come from the same DNA. So if you take bits away from behavior to make "super-CPU," the definition of the "super-CPU" has consumed the data that used to encode behavior, leaving us with the same problem.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#22

Post by good_gnu »

> Even when behavior is mostly learned rather than hard-coded, the ability to learn itself must be hard-coded. Such code occupies hundreds of megabytes of data. Consider the first generation of software for self-driving cars. NVIDIA’s deep-learning drivers for self driving cars utilize “27 million connections and 250 thousand parameters.”5 Good programmers try to restrict their functions to no more than 6 parameters when writing code. Thus, a driving system with learning ability depends on over 40,000 programmatic functions.

Obviously the author has completely misunderstood what is meant by "parameters" in this context. The parameters here are those of a neural network and thus they are a result of, not a precondition for the learning process. Instead, he should strictly use the implementation of the neural network for comparison, whose uncompressed human-readable size is probably going to be almost small enough to fill into his size constraints.

And that is assuming there is not a sufficiently good algorithm for learning animal behaviors that is much simpler than CNNs.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#23

Post by fraytormenta »

psycr wrote: post #10

Kind 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 Analys…

I did look up recent findings and they were meager. I followed your advice and looked up "Complex Traint Analysis." It is also quite meager. Were you able to find something close to 10mb? If you did, link please. I would expect that that category of genes would get a technical term alongside with "regulatory" and "encoding" genes the moment enough of them surfaced.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#24

Post by kehtnok »

> Biology is one of the last fields of science adopting the tech revolution by switching from analog to digital analysis.

Barricelli was running experiments about digital organisms back in the early 50's right before the identification of the structure of DNA. Quite literally sharing time with atomic/hydrogen bomb calculations. I find it a bit tough to press onwards when sweeping statements like the above are made as a build up to the argument.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#25

Post by fraytormenta »

good_gnu wrote: post #22

> Even when behavior is mostly learned rather than hard-coded, the ability to learn itself must be hard-coded. Such code occupies hundreds of megabytes of data. Consider the first generation of software for self-driving cars. NVIDIA’s deep-learning drivers for self driving cars utilize “27 million connections and 250 thousand parameters.”5 Good programmers try to restrict their functions to no more than 6 parameters…

Legit criticism, I actually tried to get a clarification on that, what those words mean exactly. I read most of the CNN doc and went ahead and wrote that, because I felt that it was the best meaning in context. I could be wrong about that. However, the CNN image itself must be over 1GB. So if those parameters are simply a matrix fed to the learning algorythm, the algo itself still ends up huge. > "And that is assuming there is not a sufficiently good algorithm for learning animal behaviors that is much simpler" > Right, but assuming something is not is the default unless there is evidence that something is.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#26

Post by scotty79 »

I think author severely under-appreciates how high decompression factor the whole process DNA->proteins->animal->living can have.

Each step of this compression is incredibly lossy and insanely tweaked towards good enough outcome.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#27

Post by fraytormenta »

daemonk wrote: post #7

What'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 an…

hey I am glad that you are an expert and your criticism is of this nature! With my limited knowledge, I see exactly what you mean and I agree with you. There is another difference, however, between the two computes that I think you have omitted in your comment. The cell's inner complexity shares the same information space as the organisms "computes," unlike a computer CPU (and the operating system) which is defined and built by a file entirely outside of the 10mb limit I've set. The cell must fit all of it right next to each other.

Re: DDwarf Fortress Defies Materialism

#29

Post by [deleted] »

daemonk wrote: post #7

What'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 an…

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