Re: The Game of Life

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri Dec 17 05:20:32 1999

David Lloyd-Jones wrote:

>Hal Finney writes:
>
>> It has been found that "Life is Universal", meaning that you can
>> construct a Universal Turing Machine out of the Life rules. It would
>> then be possible to program it to simulate any mathematical or logical
>> system, hence SAS's should be possible.
>
>But only if the outside world supplies the necessaries. I don't insist on
>John Horton Conway, or even Hal Finney, but I do insist that the machine be
>plugged into the wall.
>
>It's really a pissoff to see people writing about these patterns being
>"self-organizing." They're organized by the throughput from the power
>company.

Bullshit (to speak like Jacques Mallah).

Look: Life is universal, so there is a life pattern equivalent
to a Universal Dovetailer (UD) algorithm (or Schmidhuber's great
programmer...).
Among the mathematically executed programs there will be
plenty of rooms for "relative programs" in which the outside/inside
difference will be accounted. There is no reason to postulate there
is a absolute outside-world.
This is the base of Tegmark, Schmidhuber and even Everett's approaches,
I think, (and mine of course, and I think most people here agrees with
that).

Bruno
Received on Fri Dec 17 1999 - 05:20:32 PST