Re: Where the I is: game of life/internet?

From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 21:27:30 MST

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    In reference to the below: could people on the Internet allow their
    computers to host a version of one of the games of life type simulations, as
    they do the SETI programme, utilizing their computers' idle sections?

    Would this allow some real space for spontaneity?

    Mabe Eliezer and colleagues could write the code and allow for some friendly
    altruistic embediments...!

    Avatar

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
    To: <extropians@extropy.org>
    Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 4:01 AM
    Subject: Re: Where the I is

    > 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.
    >
    > --
    > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
    > Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    >
    >

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