Game of Life referenced in "intelligent design" paper

[mscibing]

Stable ash fields are also fairly compressible relative to size, just owing to their sparsity.

Their "compressed encoding" does take some advantage of sparsity, but there is enough structure in ash that their "K(X|C)" (compression scheme) can still win out over "Complexity" (compressed encoding).
Take an ash field, blank out all the honey farms (saving about 122 bits per honey farm in the "compressed encoding" for random ash density = 0.0287), stuff a honey farm in a variable Y=[Honey farm], and then add the honey farms back:
X=[ash without honey farms in compressed encoding]∪Y↓(repeat)[hf y coordinate]→(repeat)[hf x coordinate]∪Y↓...
That's 6 symbols = 30 bits per honey farm + 48 bits if you stick to 16 bit coordinates, for a net saving of 44 bits per honey farm.
Initializing the variable with a honey farm takes 207 bits (with an uncompressed pattern).
So after 5 honey farms you're already in positive observed algorithmic specified complexity. A screenful of ash ought to be enough.
Supposedly this means a screenful of ash has functional meaning. Really what it means is that ash is more compressible than a random density 0.0287 pattern.

[mscibing]

It's less of a surprise now, given experience, but I cannot even imagine what sort of smuggling is supposed to be going on.

It's the small neighborhood in the GOL rules. That's what makes the search space for interesting patterns hilly, without which hill climbing algorithms such as our spaceship search programs, or natural selection, wouldn't work. Dembski is quite right that if fitness was a random function of genotype natural selection wouldn't work. But, well, it's not; fitness is hilly.

[pcallahan]

It's the small neighborhood in the GOL rules. That's what makes the search space for interesting patterns hilly, without which hill climbing algorithms such as our spaceship search programs, or natural selection, wouldn't work. Dembski is quite right that if fitness was a random function of genotype natural selection wouldn't work. But, well, it's not; fitness is hilly.

Sure. And in the physical universe, somebody must have "smuggled" in minimization principles that cause light to travel in a straight line and planets to be more or less spherical. But the question wasn't does evolution happen in all possible universes, just does it happen in this one and did it happen here on this planet? I am pretty sure the ID people understand this. They just choose to obfuscate the point.

[Scorbie]

I just read the paper and cannot relate what this has to do with their point.

For a layman like me the gist of the paper, I think, is trying to say: It's easier to say ~~"Spider"~~ Nope, wrong name; "Smallest c/5 spaceship" rather than the RLE of it. which seems to be generally true with objects coming out of a gfind search. (Edit: clarified wording)

But as Sokwe nailed it, I don't see why this connects to "design" and such, but I guess this is due to the authors misunderstanding the "meaning" of Life?

[Hubi1857]

I just read the paper and cannot relate what this has to do with their point.

For a layman like me the gist of the paper, I think, is trying to say: It's easier to say ~~"Spider"~~ Nope, wrong name; "Smallest c/5 spaceship" rather than the RLE of it. which seems to be generally true with objects coming out of a gfind search. (Edit: clarified wording)
But as Sokwe nailed it, I don't see why this connects to "design" and such, but I guess this is due to the authors misunderstanding the "meaning" of Life?

Well, while the universal answer "42" seems to be trivial and way too boring for the average mathematician nowadays to waste much more than half a fortnight of their precious lifetime of hardly 100 years +/- 23 quarters of a day, the question of utmost importance ever since the Big Bang a few thousand giga-seconds ago remains:

Is John Conway a computer game designer or the author of himself who successfully managed to replace the holy bible with Douglas Adams book "The Hitchhikers Guide Through The Galaxy"?

Yours, Michael Hubertz, aka. @Hubi1857

PS: Sorry, peeps. But I wasted 10 years of my own precious lifetime studying theoretical and mathematical physics in Germany, living amongst poeple who are too stupid to distinguish finite complex systems from infinite complex systems and thus prefer to teach their children more important but completely useless knowledge like Euklid's axioms, Angela Merkel's laws or the rules of Russian Roulette.

The only reason for me to register with such an obsolete electronic online community like this one was the topic of this very thread about intelligent design.

So pardon me, please, if I accidentally violated any of your rules and laws and axioms beyond the simple set of instructions needed to get Conways extraordinary "Game Of Life" up and running for the all the rest of the future.
(Edit: clarified wording)

[Hubi1857]

their precious lifetime of hardly 100 years +/- 23 quarters of a day

Sorry, miscalculated the error interval by a factor of at least 5.
So it needs to read:
"their precious lifetime of hardly 100 years +/- (n×23) quarters of a day, with n>5 or n=5.

Sorry for your inconvinience,
Hubi:-)

[pcallahan]

The only reason for me to register with such an obsolete electronic online community like this one was the topic of this very thread about intelligent design.

Unfortunately, this is an unusual topic of very limited interest within this community, and I guess I bear some of the blame for bringing you here.

[Hubi1857]

Never mind.