On 10/5/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My stock example: planetary motion. Newton (actually Tycho Brahe, > Kepler, et al) observed some global behavior in this system: the orbits > are elliptical and motion follows Kepler's other laws. This corresponds > to someone seeing Game of Life for the first time, without knowing how > it works, and observing that the motion is not purely random, but seems > to have some regular patterns in it. > > Having noticed the global regularities, the next step, for Newton, was > to try to find a compact explanation for them. He was looking for the > underlying rules, the low-level mechanisms. He eventually realised (a > long story of course!) that an inverse square law of gravitation would > predict all of the behavior of these planets. This corresponds to a > hypothetical case in which a person seeing those Game of Life patterns > would somehow deduce that the rules that must be giving rise to the > patterns are the particular rules that appear in GoL. And, to be > convincing, they would have to prove that the rules gave rise to the > behavior.
with GoL you started with the rules and try to predict the behavior. with planetary motion you observe the behavior and try to discover the rules. Consider the observation of an oscillating spring or a bouncing ball. There is an exact function to determine the high-school physics version of these events. Of course they always account for "in a frictionless vacuum" or some other means of eliminating the damping effects of the environment. Is the basic function to compute the trajectory of a launch sufficient to know where the shell will land? On a windless day, probably. In a stiff breeze, there may be otherwise inexplicable behaviors. Eliminating retrograde orbits required a fundamental shift in perspective (literally changing the center of the universe) If there were a million-line CA world: So it's a million lines, it'll take more time but it's the same class of problem, no? Or are we talking about rules where one cell can modify it's own rules? Isn't that the crux of the RSI argument? Imagine a GoL cell that spontaneously gains the power to not die of loneliness until the round after it's isolated. Suppose also that this cell is able to confer this ability to any cells that it spawns. The GoL universe is fundamentally changed. Does the single evolved cell have to know the other rules to add this one? Have you ever played the drinking game 'asshole' ? If the game goes on long enough, I doubt anyone can track all of the rules :) I digress. Like those classic physics problems, we don't really need to have the ideally compact formula to have a usefully working rule. I think the real intelligence is getting work done without a complete formula. Otherwise it would be equivalent to our current computation- nobody is getting excited about the bubblesort algorithm today. I guess another level of intelligence would be the leap from bubblesort to a recursive method because a better O() efficiency. .. gotta stop here because there's too much distraction around me to think clearly. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=50615645-82967d
