Is there a pattern that will develop science?

For general discussion about Conway's Game of Life.
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rhgao
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Is there a pattern that will develop science?

Post by rhgao » July 13th, 2022, 10:31 pm

Is there a pattern in the Game of Life that will develop the science of the game just as humans developed the science of this universe in which humans live?

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Macbi
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Re: Is there a pattern that will develop science?

Post by Macbi » July 14th, 2022, 2:48 am

I think there is. I wrote a bit about this here (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3SG4WbN ... aP3CQ4fgxE) and here (viewtopic.php?p=135539#p137171).

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dvgrn
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Re: Is there a pattern that will develop science?

Post by dvgrn » July 14th, 2022, 9:14 am

To take somewhat the other side of this argument, on Quora at one point I talked about some of the problems that an intelligent Life pattern that wanted to find out what the rules of its own universe were.

One of the biggest problems is that Life has no possible reliable sensors that can detect random ash at a distance without disturbing it, let alone random incoming gliders or spaceships. You end up with something like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle on steroids: you can have a sensor that fairly reliably detects that there was something in a particular location, but now just about the only thing you can be pretty sure of is that it isn't there any more.

With an approach like mscibing's, there's some hope of building a mechanism that can clear out an area of random ash without knowing or caring what it is. But it would be very dangerous for an intelligent computer, even if it had one of those mechanisms already available, to use it to build a "glider collider" with which it could do enough experiments to give it the information necessary to deduce the rules of Life. Every experiment that produced an unexpected glider gun or glider-producing switch engine or whatever, would be in some danger of getting out of the containment area and destroying the experimenter (and maybe, through a chain reaction, its entire civilization, whatever that might look like.)

It's hard to think about probabilities on such huge scales, though. Maybe these experimenters know how to clone themselves into a containment field, then stand back for inconceivable lengths of time and wait for carefully coded information to come out. It's possible that the rules of Life could be deduced in some way like that, though it seems irreducibly dangerous, kind of like if building a Superconducting Super Collider on Earth had a significant chance of creating an Earth-swallowing black hole.

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