From: Alex Ramonsky (alex@ramonsky.com)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 11:21:07 MST
Does that include Langton's ant?
AR
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Stirling Westrup wrote:
>
>>
>>> It makes you wonder if life can suddenly come into spontaneous
>>> existence from
>>> the computations that is taking place on the net. I cannot see why not.
>>> Shurely it cannot be a worse medium than atoms in water. Unless it
>>> is too
>>> deterministic.
>>
>>
>> Its way too SMALL so far. Atoms in water are MASSIVELY parallel.
>> We're many orders of magnitude away from an Internet of sufficient
>> size that you can expect that sort of thing to happen spontaneously.
>> (And thats not even counting the fact that in many ways the internet
>> is a more hostile place than the ancient seas were.)
>
>
> Doesn't happen, ever, unless some form of order-creating process
> emerges within the parallel interactions. The last time this
> happened, with evolution as a source of order for chemistry, the
> order-creating process was quite extremely slow and used a ridiculous
> amount of memory. If things happen any faster on the Internet (i.e.,
> if anything interesting happens at all) it will be because humans
> deliberately organized the Internet, not because the Internet
> self-organized.
>
> It's not the size of the parallelism. It's the complex order of the
> computation the parallelism is performing. If anything in evolution
> or humans looks "spontaneous" it means you don't understand its causes.
>
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