This post very cleverly uses Conway’s Game of Life as an intuition pump for reasoning about agency in general. I found it to be both compelling, and a natural extension of the other work on LW relating to agency & optimization. The post also spurred some object-level engineering work in Life, trying to find a pattern that clears away Ash. It also spurred people in the comments to think more deeply about the implications of the reversibility of the laws of physics. It’s also reasonably self-contained, making it a good candidate for inclusion in the Review books.
It was unclear to me whether this post directly spurred the work on clearing away Ash or if that’s just the sort of thing Game of Life community would have been doing anyway. Did you have a strong sense of that?
Oh the only information I have about that is Dave Green’s comment, plus a few private messages from people over the years who had read the post and were interested in experimenting with concrete GoL constructions. I just messaged the author of the post on the GoL forum asking about whether any of that work was spurred by this post.
This post very cleverly uses Conway’s Game of Life as an intuition pump for reasoning about agency in general. I found it to be both compelling, and a natural extension of the other work on LW relating to agency & optimization. The post also spurred some object-level engineering work in Life, trying to find a pattern that clears away Ash. It also spurred people in the comments to think more deeply about the implications of the reversibility of the laws of physics. It’s also reasonably self-contained, making it a good candidate for inclusion in the Review books.
It was unclear to me whether this post directly spurred the work on clearing away Ash or if that’s just the sort of thing Game of Life community would have been doing anyway. Did you have a strong sense of that?
Oh the only information I have about that is Dave Green’s comment, plus a few private messages from people over the years who had read the post and were interested in experimenting with concrete GoL constructions. I just messaged the author of the post on the GoL forum asking about whether any of that work was spurred by this post.