I would say it all depends on whether there is a wall gadget which protects everything on one side from anything on the other side. (And don’t forget the corner gadget.)
If so, cover the edges of the controlled portion in it, except for a “gate” gadget which is supposed to be a wall except openable and closable. (This is relatively easier since a width of 100 ought to be enough, and since we can stack 10000 of these in case one is broken through—rarely should chaos be able to reach through a 100x10000 rectangle.)
Wait 10^40 steps for the chaos to lose entropy. The structures that remain should be highly compressible in a CS sense, and made of a small number of natural gadget types. Send out ships that cover everything in gliders. This should resurrect the chaos temporarily, but decrease entropy further in the long run. Repeat 10^10 times, waiting 10^40 steps in between.
The rest should be a simple matter of carefully distinguishing the remaining natural gadgets with ship sensors to dismantle each. Programming a smiley face deployer that starts from an empty slate is a trivial matter.
If walls are constructible, there’s no need for gates, and also one could allow a margin for error in the sensory ships: One could advance the walls after claiming some area, in case a rare encounter summons another era of chaos.
All this is less AGI than ordinary game AI—a bundle of programmed responses.
Seems plausible to me. I guess the fundamental difference between our universe and Life is that in Life (1) you can do things in Life without “collecting resources” because there is no conservation of energy, and (2) it is perhaps relatively easy to dismantle arbitrary chaos.
Any idea how to amend the control question to more directly point at this issue of whether “influence = AI” under our own physics?
I would say it all depends on whether there is a wall gadget which protects everything on one side from anything on the other side. (And don’t forget the corner gadget.)
If so, cover the edges of the controlled portion in it, except for a “gate” gadget which is supposed to be a wall except openable and closable. (This is relatively easier since a width of 100 ought to be enough, and since we can stack 10000 of these in case one is broken through—rarely should chaos be able to reach through a 100x10000 rectangle.)
Wait 10^40 steps for the chaos to lose entropy. The structures that remain should be highly compressible in a CS sense, and made of a small number of natural gadget types. Send out ships that cover everything in gliders. This should resurrect the chaos temporarily, but decrease entropy further in the long run. Repeat 10^10 times, waiting 10^40 steps in between.
The rest should be a simple matter of carefully distinguishing the remaining natural gadgets with ship sensors to dismantle each. Programming a smiley face deployer that starts from an empty slate is a trivial matter.
If walls are constructible, there’s no need for gates, and also one could allow a margin for error in the sensory ships: One could advance the walls after claiming some area, in case a rare encounter summons another era of chaos.
All this is less AGI than ordinary game AI—a bundle of programmed responses.
Making a ‘ship sensor’ is tricky. If it collides with something unexpected it will create more chaos that you’ll have to clear up.
Seems plausible to me. I guess the fundamental difference between our universe and Life is that in Life (1) you can do things in Life without “collecting resources” because there is no conservation of energy, and (2) it is perhaps relatively easy to dismantle arbitrary chaos.
Any idea how to amend the control question to more directly point at this issue of whether “influence = AI” under our own physics?