Conway’s Game of Life (GoL) is a simple cellular automaton which is Turing-complete. As a result, it should be possible to build an “artificial intelligence” system in GoL. One way that we could phrase this is: if we imagine a GoL board with 10^30 rows and 10^30 columns, and we are able to set the initial state of the top left 10^20 by 10^20 square, can we set that initial state appropriately such that after a suitable amount of time, we the full board evolves to a desired state (perhaps a giant smiley face), for the vast majority of possible initializations of the remaining area?
This requires us to find some setting of the initial 10^20 by 10^20 square that has [expandable, steerable influence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tmZRyXvH9dgopcnuE/life-and-expanding-steerable-consequences). Intuitively, the best way to do this would be to build “sensors” and “effectors” to have inputs and outputs, and then have some program decide what the effectors should do based on the input from the sensors, and the “goal” of the program would be to steer the world towards the desired state. Thus, this is a framing of the problem of AI (both capabilities and alignment) in GoL, rather than in our native physics.
Planned opinion:
With the tower of abstractions we humans have built, we now naturally think in terms of inputs and outputs for the agents we build. This hypothetical seems good for shaking us out of that mindset, as we don’t really know what the analogous inputs and outputs in GoL would be, and so we are forced to consider those aspects of the design process as well.
Planned summary for the Alignment Newsletter:
Planned opinion:
Yeah this seems right to me.
Thank you for all the summarization work you do, Rohin.