In related puzzles I did hear something a while ago now, Bostrom perhaps. You have say 6 challenging events to achieve to get from no life to us. They are random and some of those steps are MUCH harder than the others, but if you look at the successful runs, you cant in hindsight see what they are. For life its say no life to life, simple single cell to complex cell and perhaps 4 other events that aren’t so rare.
A run is a sequence of 100 steps where you either don’t achieve the end state (all 6 challenging events achieved in order, or you do)
There is a 1 in a million chance that a run is successful.
Now if you look at the successful runs, you cant then in hindsight see what events were really hard and which weren’t. The event with 1⁄10,000 chance at each step may have taken just 5 steps in the successful run, it couldn’t take 10,000 steps because only 100 are allowed etc.
I wonder if there’s a connection with anthropic reasoning. Let’s suppose that a bomb goes off on rolling an odd number...
In related puzzles I did hear something a while ago now, Bostrom perhaps. You have say 6 challenging events to achieve to get from no life to us. They are random and some of those steps are MUCH harder than the others, but if you look at the successful runs, you cant in hindsight see what they are. For life its say no life to life, simple single cell to complex cell and perhaps 4 other events that aren’t so rare.
A run is a sequence of 100 steps where you either don’t achieve the end state (all 6 challenging events achieved in order, or you do)
There is a 1 in a million chance that a run is successful.
Now if you look at the successful runs, you cant then in hindsight see what events were really hard and which weren’t. The event with 1⁄10,000 chance at each step may have taken just 5 steps in the successful run, it couldn’t take 10,000 steps because only 100 are allowed etc.