Re: Where the I is

From: Alex Ramonsky (alex@ramonsky.com)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 11:21:07 MST

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    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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