Here’s my immediate thought on it: you define a single world bit string W, and A, O and Y are just designated subsections of it. You are able to know only the contents of O, and can set the contents of A (this feels like it’s reducing the entropy of the whole world btw, so you could also postulate that you can only do so by drawing free energy from some other region, your fuel F: for each bit of A you set deterministically, you need to randomize two of F, so that the overall entropy increases). After this, some kind of map W→f(W) is applied repeatedly, evolving the system until such time comes to check that the region Y is indeed as close as possible to your goal configuration G. I think at this point the properties of the result will depend on the properties of the map—is it a “lock” map like your suggested one (compare a region of A with O, and if they’re identical, clone the rest of A into Y, possibly using up F to keep the entropy increase positive?). Is it reversible, is it chaotic?
Yeah, not sure, I need to think about it. Reversibility (even acting as if these were qubits and not simple bits) might be the key here. In general I think there can’t be any hard rule against lock-like maps, because the real world allows building locks. But maybe there’s some rule about how if you define the map itself randomly enough, it probably won’t be a lock-map (for example, you could define a map as a series of operations on two bits writing to a third one op(i,j)→k; decide a region of your world for it, encode bit indices and operators as bit strings, and you can make the map’s program itself a part of the world, and then define what makes a map a lock-like map and how probable that occurrence is).
Here’s my immediate thought on it: you define a single world bit string W, and A, O and Y are just designated subsections of it. You are able to know only the contents of O, and can set the contents of A (this feels like it’s reducing the entropy of the whole world btw, so you could also postulate that you can only do so by drawing free energy from some other region, your fuel F: for each bit of A you set deterministically, you need to randomize two of F, so that the overall entropy increases). After this, some kind of map W→f(W) is applied repeatedly, evolving the system until such time comes to check that the region Y is indeed as close as possible to your goal configuration G. I think at this point the properties of the result will depend on the properties of the map—is it a “lock” map like your suggested one (compare a region of A with O, and if they’re identical, clone the rest of A into Y, possibly using up F to keep the entropy increase positive?). Is it reversible, is it chaotic?
Yeah, not sure, I need to think about it. Reversibility (even acting as if these were qubits and not simple bits) might be the key here. In general I think there can’t be any hard rule against lock-like maps, because the real world allows building locks. But maybe there’s some rule about how if you define the map itself randomly enough, it probably won’t be a lock-map (for example, you could define a map as a series of operations on two bits writing to a third one op(i,j)→k; decide a region of your world for it, encode bit indices and operators as bit strings, and you can make the map’s program itself a part of the world, and then define what makes a map a lock-like map and how probable that occurrence is).