I guess I’ve always had a vague intuition along the lines that, if you built a game of life of ~ the scale of our universe and started it in a random initial configuration, that there would be many rulesets that are:
Simpler than our laws of physics.
Have a high probability of producing self-preserving and self-replicating patterns after enough time.
Then, I’d expect intelligence to arise convergently as a useful strategy for the patterns to perpetuate / replicate themselves in the game of life’s selection environment.
I would also guess that a large enough game of life world would eventually give rise to intelligent civilization (especially after observing recent progress on designing ash-clearing machines in some random game of life hobbyist forum that I can’t find now; not sure if that should be a real update but I hadn’t realized that this was probably possible).
It’s not at all clear to me whether the game of life rules are actually simpler than our physics. I agree it does casually seem that way, but it seems incredibly hard to say right now.
See this comment and its links on what the long-term future of an infinite randomly-initialized GoL grid looks like. In brief, an infinite field of “ash”, random oscillating or fixed patterns, which would likely eventually(after an exponentially long time?) be invaded by self-replicators.
I conjecture that it will take longer for these patterns to appear in Life than in our universe, though. In our universe we got intelligent by bootstrapping off of simpler replicators, I’m not sure if Life is set up to make that possible/likely...
My initial thought was that this universe would have low complexity. It has simple rules, and a simple initialization process. However, I suppose that, for a deterministic GoL rule set, the simple initialization process might not result in simple dynamics going forward. I think it depends on whether low-level noise in the exact cell patterns “washes out” for the higher level patterns.
Maybe we need some sort of low entropy initialization or a non-deterministic rule set?
Not necessarily, it would just be very different from our world. One potential problem is that it can be easier for an irreversible universe to slip into an inert ‘dead’ state, since information can be globally erased.
I’m not sure I agree with this. For instance, changing one’s “velocity” in a controlled manner seems nearly impossible in practically all cellular automata for various reasons, partly because they lack Poincare invariance. Could one have intelligent life without this?
I’m pretty sure you can have intelligent life arise in computational environments that lack any sort of notion of velocity. E.g., the computational environments of the brain and current DL systems seem able to support intelligence, but they don’t have straightforward notions of velocity.
They are created by other intelligent minds, though. What I mean is, would it be adaptive for intelligence to evolve without velocity?
I would analogize it to plants vs animals. Animals tend to be much more intelligent than plants, presumably because their ability to move around means that they have to deal with much more varied conditions, or because they can have much more complex influences on the world. These seem difficult to achieve without varying one’s velocity. There’s also stuff like social relations; inanimate organisms might help or hurt each other, but they probably have to do so in much simpler ways, since their positions relative to each other are fixed, while animals can more easily interact with others in more complex ways and have more varying relations.
I guess I’ve always had a vague intuition along the lines that, if you built a game of life of ~ the scale of our universe and started it in a random initial configuration, that there would be many rulesets that are:
Simpler than our laws of physics.
Have a high probability of producing self-preserving and self-replicating patterns after enough time.
Then, I’d expect intelligence to arise convergently as a useful strategy for the patterns to perpetuate / replicate themselves in the game of life’s selection environment.
I would also guess that a large enough game of life world would eventually give rise to intelligent civilization (especially after observing recent progress on designing ash-clearing machines in some random game of life hobbyist forum that I can’t find now; not sure if that should be a real update but I hadn’t realized that this was probably possible).
It’s not at all clear to me whether the game of life rules are actually simpler than our physics. I agree it does casually seem that way, but it seems incredibly hard to say right now.
See this comment and its links on what the long-term future of an infinite randomly-initialized GoL grid looks like. In brief, an infinite field of “ash”, random oscillating or fixed patterns, which would likely eventually(after an exponentially long time?) be invaded by self-replicators.
I conjecture that it will take longer for these patterns to appear in Life than in our universe, though. In our universe we got intelligent by bootstrapping off of simpler replicators, I’m not sure if Life is set up to make that possible/likely...
Doesn’t intelligence require a low-entropy setting to be useful? If your surroundings are all random noise then no-free-lunch theorem applies.
My initial thought was that this universe would have low complexity. It has simple rules, and a simple initialization process. However, I suppose that, for a deterministic GoL rule set, the simple initialization process might not result in simple dynamics going forward. I think it depends on whether low-level noise in the exact cell patterns “washes out” for the higher level patterns.
Maybe we need some sort of low entropy initialization or a non-deterministic rule set?
Entropy is less of a problem in GoL than our universe because the ruleset isn’t reversible, so you don’t need a free energy source to erase errors.
Are there any problems with an irreversible ruleset?
Not necessarily, it would just be very different from our world. One potential problem is that it can be easier for an irreversible universe to slip into an inert ‘dead’ state, since information can be globally erased.
There is also no possibility for a Penrose-style return to form due to extremely unlikely random fluctuations over extreme lengths of time.
I’m not sure I agree with this. For instance, changing one’s “velocity” in a controlled manner seems nearly impossible in practically all cellular automata for various reasons, partly because they lack Poincare invariance. Could one have intelligent life without this?
I’m pretty sure you can have intelligent life arise in computational environments that lack any sort of notion of velocity. E.g., the computational environments of the brain and current DL systems seem able to support intelligence, but they don’t have straightforward notions of velocity.
They are created by other intelligent minds, though. What I mean is, would it be adaptive for intelligence to evolve without velocity?
I would analogize it to plants vs animals. Animals tend to be much more intelligent than plants, presumably because their ability to move around means that they have to deal with much more varied conditions, or because they can have much more complex influences on the world. These seem difficult to achieve without varying one’s velocity. There’s also stuff like social relations; inanimate organisms might help or hurt each other, but they probably have to do so in much simpler ways, since their positions relative to each other are fixed, while animals can more easily interact with others in more complex ways and have more varying relations.