To stay unbiased about all of the commenters here, do not visit this link and search the page for names. (sorry, but—wait no, not sorry)
So it seems to me that the smaller you can make a quine in some system with the property that small changes in it mean it produces nearly itself as output, the more likely that system is going to produce replicating evolution-capable things. Or something, I’m making this up as I go along. Is this concept sensical? Is there a computationally feasible way to test anything about it? Has it been discussed over and over?
Maybe we can do far better than evolution, but if we could design a good parallelizable “evolution-friendly” environment and see whether organisms develop that’d still be phenomenal.
To stay unbiased about all of the commenters here, do not visit this link and search the page for names. (sorry, but—wait no, not sorry)
So it seems to me that the smaller you can make a quine in some system with the property that small changes in it mean it produces nearly itself as output, the more likely that system is going to produce replicating evolution-capable things. Or something, I’m making this up as I go along. Is this concept sensical? Is there a computationally feasible way to test anything about it? Has it been discussed over and over?
Maybe we can do far better than evolution, but if we could design a good parallelizable “evolution-friendly” environment and see whether organisms develop that’d still be phenomenal.