[HN Gopher] Classical sorting algorithms as a model of morphogen...
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Classical sorting algorithms as a model of morphogenesis (2023)
Author : filoeleven
Score : 160 points
Date : 2024-12-18 23:17 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| ziofill wrote:
| I recommend Michael Levin's YouTube channel. Lots and lots of
| fascinating discussions.
| jstrieb wrote:
| The last coauthor listed on this preprint is Michael Levin, who
| has a lot of other cool work.
|
| In particular, this talk of his from NeurIPS 2018 includes
| fascinating biology research results, as well as musings on the
| future of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence.
|
| https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg
|
| HN discussion about the talk:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
| jcims wrote:
| He's on Lex Fridman's podcast as well -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU
|
| Great conversation.
| mycall wrote:
| Artem Kirsanov has many great videos on this subject most of
| which I fail to absorb on first pass.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@ArtemKirsanov/videos
| filoeleven wrote:
| I first found him through one of his presentations on YouTube.
| His other work is, to me, waaay more interesting and pertinent.
|
| His lab's model of what cancer is and their effective treatment
| of it using bioelectricity could very well be a game-changer.
| All the stuff about making two-headed flatworms using the same
| mechanics, with no changes to the genome, is fascinating. One
| of the companies he's with is working on a device to re-grow
| amputated limbs in humans. It's some serious sci-fi stuff.
|
| I chose to post this paper because text usually does better on
| HN than video, and it's an unexpected find in one of our basic
| tools. I fully expect his other research to show up here more
| often as it grows to fruition.
|
| Anyone interested in checking out more of his work can browse
| this list of his papers, which goes all the way back to 1995.
| https://drmichaellevin.org/publications/
| mithametacs wrote:
| Building something that _isn 't_ Turing-complete is surprisingly-
| hard once it's complex enough.
|
| If basal intelligence is present in diverse computational
| structures, then weak intelligence is everywhere.
|
| If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are
| everywhere, ... where are the aliens?
|
| Personally, I blame game theory. Too many agents too smart in one
| place, you get conflicts, and eventually someone breaks an atom
| apart in your direction.
|
| Or do you need emotions to have conflict? Are there basal
| emotions?
|
| I'm usually not worried about AI uprisings, but I do believe in
| the possibility of conflict.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Where is it written that intelligent beings must create the
| means for interstellar communication, or any technology at all?
|
| Imagine a planet with highly intelligent whales who have no way
| to manipulate their environment (hands) and no need to.
| Teever wrote:
| Every organism manipulates their environment in some way. The
| ones that can manipulate it in a way that allows them access
| to more resources than the others will out compete the ones
| who don't.
| abrookewood wrote:
| Still hard to smelt metal if you live in the ocean.
| bboygravity wrote:
| That's why genetic mutations happened and they grew hands
| and started smelting on land.
|
| This happened.
| gf000 wrote:
| Evolution doesn't really work like that. It's just a low
| bar that everything has to cross from time to time. Being a
| specialist, very advanced hunter is in no ways better than
| a dumb jellyfish that spawns billions of offsprings.
| dboreham wrote:
| Experience on earth that they eventually evolve hands.
| cutemonster wrote:
| That's because there's land here, but what about a planet
| with only water, or just not enough land.
|
| But maybe water-surface-only (no land surface) is unlikely
| manmal wrote:
| There would still be enough earth like planets with land.
| oersted wrote:
| Why would water prevent the evolution of hands? Lots of
| sea creatures have claws.
|
| The sea is also not all that different from an atmosphere
| with a higher density in principle, we live "under-air".
| cutemonster wrote:
| Looking at this planet, it's less likely to happen.
|
| Maybe high density (water) makes tools less useful, and
| thus hands less useful,
|
| since you cannot move a tool particularly fast under
| water, compared to on land.
|
| I suppose you've tried throwing a stone underwater --
| compare with throwing on land.
|
| From this seems to follow, that creatures with human like
| intelligence, are less likely to appear, if the density
| of the liquid or gas surrounding them, is too high.
| (Dolphins are bright but not that bright.)
| RedNifre wrote:
| That is incorrect, dolphins are unlikely to evolve hands
| and humanoids evolved hands before they became intelligent
| (probably to grab branches). It was very lucky that a good
| brain evolved in a body that already had hands.
| cutemonster wrote:
| > very lucky that a good brain evolved in a body that
| already had hands.
|
| The other way around: hands adds evolutionary pressure
| towards becoming more intelligent. (The ones that
| understand how to use their hands and tools better...)
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| The lack of knowledge.
|
| Dolphins do have organs with which they pick up things
| like rocks or shells and they are able to give them to
| each other.
|
| They use their sexual organs as "hands"! Both males and
| females.
|
| In the tree of life brains are correlated much more
| strongly with locomotion than with hands. The moment you
| need to do (inverse) kinematics to plan an immediate
| action, and to plan sequences of motions, and to plan a
| hunting or fleeing strategy, is what put pressure to
| evolve brains, static lifeforms can be very complex and
| have complicated genomes, but brains you wont find in
| them...
| Shorel wrote:
| If elephants were carnivores, with their trunks, they would
| have evolved efficient methods to hunt, and would probably
| be the dominant species on the earth landmass surface.
|
| All this without hands.
|
| The fact that they are vegetarian gave us the chance to do
| that evolution ourselves.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Are you wondering why Conway's Game of Life or the C++ type
| system isn't trying to communicate with us from beyond the
| stars?
| mithametacs wrote:
| Beyond the stars, a static void. Ions, but no aliens.
|
| Till one day SETI finds a 5k line template compilation error!
|
| Rejoice! We are not alone! Aliens have to deal with C++ too!
| swayvil wrote:
| >where are the aliens?
|
| It's probably a Plato's Cave situation. You're chained there,
| staring at flickering shadows on the wall asking, "Where are
| the aliens?".
|
| Which is to say, the dimension that must be traversed in order
| to meet the aliens is an invisible one.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| > If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are
| everywhere, ... where are the aliens?
|
| Someone has to be first (in our speed-of-causality bubble),
| maybe it's us?
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Doesn't that seem even less likely? Not only do we exist but
| we're the first?
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| No, it actually seems to be the most likely explanation.
| The universe is so young yet. It's just a cosmic blip of
| time since the current generation of stars has began
| forming.
| ben_w wrote:
| Not without more information.
|
| We don't know how long it takes to evolve our level and
| kind of intelligence, nor if intelligence like ours implies
| successful expansion such that it could eventually be
| noticed from the kinds of distances we can sense with our
| tech, nor how fast it would actually expand.
|
| If the first in any light cone dominates that light cone,
| expanding at a high fraction of c, then almost everyone
| starts off thinking they're the first.
|
| We may be the first _in our own light cone_ , and that
| light cone may be just about to start intersecting with
| that of a galaxy where every star has been completely
| Dyson'd by a Kardeshev 3 civilisation.
|
| If the civilisation is two million years older than us,
| that galaxy could even be the Andromeda galaxy.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| The Fermi paradox can be answered in so many ways, and is tied
| to questions like what is the purpose of life and the universe.
|
| Beyond the existence of a single person (such as myself, or
| you) what do we exist to do?
|
| Is it to learn the universe? (Curiosity) Is it to decrease
| entropy locally in order to increase it globally? (Spend
| energy) Is it to increase complexity? (Do interesting things,
| foster maximum diversity?)
|
| For example, if the purpose is indeed curiosity, maybe all we
| will need is one Dyson sphere in order to understand the
| universe. We could have a dozen super intelligent life forms in
| our galaxy alone and probably wouldn't notice them. Basically
| would just look like a quiet black hole the size of a star.
| yesco wrote:
| In my opinion, life is just self-replicating tumbleweeds of
| matter that drift towards local spaces with high energy. The
| ideal "shape" of these tumbleweeds is gradually approximated
| via the algorithm of evolution, filtering out the tumbleweeds
| that fly too close to the sun and so on. Intelligence becomes
| an emergent property of these optimal shapes, but
| intelligence doesn't change the outcome, broadly speaking,
| they still drift towards local spaces with high energy.
|
| Individual organisms will live their life perusing energy,
| with every breath, with every meal. Even super organisms,
| such as a nation, will (attempt to) peruse energy in the form
| of a thriving economy, which influences the energy allocation
| of the organisms that make it up.
|
| Even absent these tumbleweeds, high density matter (high
| energy) will literally bend space, and attract other matter
| to itself through gravitational force. It's entirely
| different than what I've already discussed, yet intuitively
| similar?
|
| How does this apply to the fermi paradox? Maybe the idea that
| the algorithm of evolution will eventually lead to life self-
| propagating across the universe is flawed. Maybe the spirit
| of exploration is not universal. Maybe the the simple fact
| that interstellar travel and communication is energy
| inefficient is enough to explain the aggregate effect we are
| seeing?
| FloorEgg wrote:
| it sounds like your take is the entropy one, but with a
| caveat that dark energy prevents Indefinite growth.
| mithametacs wrote:
| I find the most interesting possibility: - life finds a way
| - life gets too smart - life kills itself - life finds a
| way
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I thought Dyson sphere will emit enormous radiation anyway?
| Like how do you convert photons into electricity and use that
| electricity afterwards with 100% efficiency? Is it even
| theoretically possible? There should be lots of heat emitted
| as infrared light.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Hard to fathom what engineering a civilization like that
| might be capable of, maybe it would emit extremely hard to
| detect radio noise.
| kiba wrote:
| A dyson swarm is nothing difficult to achieve. All you need
| is the ability to put satellite into orbit. That's the
| minimum. The other part is mass manufacturing them.
| andsoitis wrote:
| How much energy and material is needed to manufacture,
| launch, position, maintain, and then leverage a Dyson
| swarm?
| exe34 wrote:
| emotions are just a form of intelligence that's calcified over
| evolutionary time. each one of our emotions can be linked with
| survival and/or reproduction.
| woolion wrote:
| >Building something that isn't Turing-complete is surprisingly-
| hard once it's complex enough
|
| The most basic computational device that is studied is the
| (deterministic) finite automaton, which corresponds to regular
| languages (regex, although actual implementations are usually
| way more powerful). If you add a stack (to count parenthesis
| basically) you have context-free (CF) languages, which
| correspond to the syntax of most programming languages. Add a
| second stack and you're already Turing-complete (TC).
|
| If you know that, you can add any extra-power to your machine
| that is strictly less than a second unbounded stack, and you
| get a new language class! For a example, a second n-bounded
| stack. If you do so you will easily get an infinity of language
| classes. The point is, are they interesting? In particular, the
| language classes we focus on have some good properties that
| most arbitrary classes tend to lack.
|
| The Chomsky hierarchy has context-sensitive languages in
| between CF and TC, but it is already not a very natural class
| so I've never seen it discussed anywhere, even in complexity
| theory research --which focuses a lot more in getting links to
| computability theory or subtle distinctions between
| deterministic and non-deterministic classes (most famously P vs
| NP). For the latter, studying analogs of the complexity classes
| on restricted models of computations is an interesting approach
| since Turing machines are difficult to work with.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| In natural language processing, mildly context-sensitive
| languages (which sit between context-free and context-
| sensitive) have seen some study and use, because context-free
| languages fall short to model certain phenomena but context-
| sensitive are overkill (and not even polynomial to process).
| kstenerud wrote:
| > If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are
| everywhere, ... where are the aliens?
|
| Most certainly outside of our light cone.
|
| It took 4 billion years for this planet to produce intelligent
| life that can send out radio signals. If we were to wipe
| ourselves out, it would be another half a billion years for
| another intelligent species to appear on this planet (probably?
| - using Cambrian explosion as a benchmark FWIW).
|
| We've been emitting radio signals for a century so far, and
| mayyyyybe we'll last another 1000 years before we blow
| ourselves up? This is something we can only conjecture about at
| this point.
|
| But just for the sake of argument, let's say that a post-radio-
| emissions intelligent species lasts 10,000 years. This means
| that our light cone must match up to a 10,000 year period in a
| planet's 4b year history (or 500m year repeat) TODAY, in order
| for us to detect anything at all. The chances of that are
| vanishingly small. And they're certainly not going to visit us
| a mere 100 years after we began emitting detectable signals.
|
| It's not just a problem of space; it's a problem of time (and
| timing).
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Why isn't at least one species expanding across the cosmos
| though? The light speed limit isn't really much of a hurdle
| for cosmic timescales.
|
| The guy on cool worlds YouTube channel (Department of
| Astronomy, Colombia) has argued that we're still in the early
| days. The conditions for intelligent life in the galaxy
| hasn't been around for that long.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Perhaps there is, but once again it would have to be
| visible from our light cone in order for us to even be
| capable of detecting it. Even with a civilization of
| 100,000 or even a million years that's still tiny and
| highly unlikely to happen within a timeframe that
| intersects with our small window of awareness.
|
| And even if these aliens have cracked FTL travel, who's
| ever going to find our little planet on the ass end of some
| mediocre galaxy, with an EM emissions bubble that has only
| covered 100 light years so far? Needle in a haystack.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Hmm, let's say there's 100 billion stars in our galaxy
| and one billion habitable planets. Assuming we are
| average, half, or 500 million have civilizations older
| than ours. We could assume some sort of distribution
| where we could say 10% are older than a million years. So
| 50 million civilizations older than a million years in
| the milky way. In a million years moving at 0.1c you move
| 100,000 light years, or across the whole galaxy.
|
| They could have been here already before modern humans
| even existed.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Seeing how it took earth 4 billion years to figure out
| how to get inhabitants to set foot on another stellar
| body the rise of intelligence may be the unlikely event
| here.
|
| Perhaps it's much more likely to have happened elsewhere
| in the galaxy 4 more billion years from now. If I
| remember correctly, stars with our particular properties
| haven't been around for too long.
|
| I recommend looking into cool worlds lab since you seem
| to like inferring from the numbers.
| mithametacs wrote:
| We've set foot on only 1 other stellar body.
|
| Luna is sort of made from the Earth. And it's so close
| that Earth has a stronger pull on it than Sun.
|
| So we have set foot on another stellar body, sure. But we
| also... kind of haven't.
|
| And then we had to retreat from it anyway. Homo sapiens,
| hunter champions, arrived at an uninhabited body and were
| outmatched.
|
| Way to go, smartest species we know of. You've done jack
| shit.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Maybe interstellar colonization is just never gonna be
| worth it?
|
| We could already colonize Antarctica, or the sea-- those
| are easier to reach, supply and colonize than other
| planets, but we are not trying.
|
| Most of our past exploration/settling efforts happened
| because there was _some_ gain to be had; it seems quite
| plausible (if somewhat bleak) to me that interstellar
| travel could just remain pointlessly expensive regardless
| of technological progress.
| aflukasz wrote:
| > We could already colonize Antarctica, or the sea--
| those are easier to reach, supply and colonize than other
| planets, but we are not trying.
|
| On the other hand - we were and still are present on the
| Antarctica, have a permanent base on the South Pole etc.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It may simply not be worth it. Outside of sheer curiosity,
| there are two reasons I can think of to leave your own
| solar system. One is overcoming resource scarcity. But
| interstellar space is extremely hostile to anything that
| isn't a cloud of dust and there are no resources available
| for thousands if not millions of years. If you've developed
| technology already to overcome the need for resources and
| are hardened to endure conditions for that span of time,
| you may overcome the resource limits of your own solar
| system anyway.
|
| The second reason is to escape the death of your own sun.
| That takes long enough that far fewer lifeforms would be
| expected to even face that challenge compared to resource
| scarcity. If you manage to sustain a high-level
| civilization that can overcome resource scarcity and
| conquer the challenges of interstellar travel for the
| billions of years it takes a star to die, maybe you can
| simply prevent that death by technological means we could
| not possibly foresee or understand?
|
| Those are hand-wavy answers, but this is sort of the
| problem. We're imagining near god-like beings here and
| asking why they don't behave the way humans have
| historically behaved with respect to exploring and
| colonizing remote parts of our own planet. The analogy
| breaks down at some point and we have no idea what beings
| capable of that kind of thing would even want to do.
|
| Even our best sci-fi imagines answers that are pulled out
| of imaginary asses but frankly no less plausible than
| anything else anyone here will come up with. The builders
| of the expanse series expanded to a few hundred systems but
| then simply didn't need to expand any further. They figured
| out how to stop fusion and star-aging and tapped into
| energy sources from other universes (then got killed off
| anyway, but seemingly would not have kept expanding). The
| monolith aliens of the space odyssey series evolved into a
| non-material form that was actually here the whole time but
| we had no means of detecting them.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| In half a billion years our sun will start the end of its
| life cycle and boil away all oceans on earth. So life as we
| know it will end then. But intelligent life probably won't
| take so long to evolve again and we have several species
| today who have enormous potential if they only manage to
| evolve usage of tools somehow. We are where we are today to a
| large part because of our prehensile extremities.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I think you might be off by an order of magnitude. The sun
| is expected to begin the death process (and therefore swell
| into a red giant) in 5 billion years, not 500 million
| years.
| Izkata wrote:
| > using Cambrian explosion as a benchmark
|
| I think that's wrong. And thinking of it like that provides
| another possibility:
|
| The dinosaur era was a local maximum that couldn't develop
| human-like intelligence and technology. Then around 65
| million years ago, Earth got "reset" and broke us out of the
| local maximum. Only after that did life have a chance to
| develop in a different direction and end up as us.
|
| Seems at least possible to me that life is quite abundant,
| but local maximums that can't develop intelligence/technology
| might be more common than we think and it's easy to get stuck
| there. Earth just got lucky.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Extending your logic (which is convincing), we, too, could
| be a local maximum and a form that is relatively low on the
| "cosmic intelligence scale", if there is such a thing and
| if it is linear-ish.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > Or do you need emotions to have conflict?
|
| Microbes and insects have massive conflicts.
| naasking wrote:
| > If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are
| everywhere, ... where are the aliens?
|
| A species needs more than raw intelligence to create
| technology. They also need:
|
| 1. Dexterity: dolphins and ravens are intelligent, but they
| have no fine motor manipulators, so there is no way to build
| technology.
|
| 2. Reasonably high bandwidth communication: other primates are
| intelligent, social and dextrous, but don't have sophisticated
| language for precise and expansive communication.
|
| 3. Social inclinations leading to building cultural knowledge
| across generations: octopuses are intelligent, are reasonably
| dextrous, and their colour changing ability could possibly be
| used for reasonably moderate bandwidth communication, but they
| are largely solitary creatures.
|
| There are probably even a couple more.
|
| Edit: come to think of it, I think a species that builds
| technology would need to have all of the above features _and_
| feature some distinct physical _disadvantages_ in order to
| drive them towards compensating by developing tools and
| knowledge to survive. For instance, humans are physically quite
| weak compared to other primates.
| oefnak wrote:
| Can't make fire under water either.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Sure you can, it's just harder.
| 6510 wrote:
| ????
|
| All species are full of technologies, one more exotic than
| the next. We have a hard time replicating it and we don't
| understand how it all works.
|
| What we have is an insanely fast research, design and
| construction process.
|
| But nothing as simple as a competitive pump on the horizon.
| Trees be laughing at us.
| sitkack wrote:
| "The Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis: a model system for
| basal cognition" by Michael Levin
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAQFO4g7UY8
|
| And from Machine Learning Street Talk
|
| Michael Levin - Why Intelligence Isn't Limited To Brains.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w5xr8BYV8M
| sitkack wrote:
| I highly recommend sitting down and really watching a couple
| talks by Michael Levin. After Robert Sapolsky, I haven't found
| a person that changed my perspective on whatever passes for
| reality more than Levin.
|
| https://drmichaellevin.org/ (link to his lab)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MichaelLevinBiology/comments/18x3vn...
|
| Academic YT channel https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| A beach sorts itself by size of sand, just by applying physics,
| so any array copied by parallel processes will sort itself given
| enough time, by computation time spend on the element aka the
| size of the rocks.
| danwills wrote:
| I think if you 'just apply physics' (let's say 'just apply
| computation' shall we?) then an array of numbers can only hope
| for this to happen In a kind of bogosort-style way?: Shuffle
| them all, and if now sorted, return! Else, loop and shuffle
| again, and so on. Such a hillarious sort algo.. but wait till u
| hear about bogobogosort! lollll!
|
| But different sizes of sand do move against each other
| differently, and I think maybe that aspect is slightly
| reminiscent of the every-cell-for-themselves aspect of the
| cells described in the paper, and especially how the different
| rules allow different swapping operations when the swap-target
| is smaller or larger than the current cell. So I think it's a
| very relevant observation!
| niemandhier wrote:
| This is fun, but I would call it an example of self organization
| / self organized complexity not intelligence.
|
| Cell membranes assemble themselves, so do micella ( little
| spherical protein baubles ), or to take a non living example
| lipid bilayers.
|
| We would not call such a system intelligent.
| danwills wrote:
| One of Levin's main points is to describe agency/intelligence
| as a continuous spectrum rather than an on/off thing so within
| the framework of thought that this paper exists in, it's no
| longer meaningful to treat the answer to the 'is it
| intelligence?' question as having a boolean answer.
|
| I completely agree with this myself (and have for a long time
| before I even read any of Levin's frankly amazing work) and I
| think of the answer to this as more like a float/real-numbered
| thing - the amount of consciousness/intelligence/agency as a
| fraction of overall energy usage or something maybe? And that
| probably will lead to one constantly having to try to work out
| where the heck zero and one are all the time eh? heheh : )
|
| I think it's fun and fascinating as well though for sure, and I
| think that even stuff as simple as a reaction-diffusion
| simulation, can actually contain some tiny elements of agency
| (just like this paper does with it's self-sorting cells!) Who
| cares what the scale is, right?, it's the same phenomena at the
| tiniest scales in my opinion, that led to life, that led to
| humans.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Whatever the purpose of this "sliding scale" is, it has
| little to do with the property of intelligence we are
| concerned with generally.
|
| When we say one species is more intelligent than another, one
| breed of dog, or one person -- we aren't describing a
| difference in their organisational structure. And when we
| want to build intelligent systems we aim to build things that
| have specific capacities, not that have this sort of abstract
| organisation which is entirely orthogonal to these
| capacities.
|
| One dog is more intelligent than another if it can read the
| intentions of its owner (theory of mind), coordinate in its
| environment (eg., open doors, etc.), plan more extended
| actions, pretend/fake actions to confuse the owner/other-
| dogs, and so on.
|
| These ranges of capacities do not follow from an abstract
| 'organisational' description of the dog. The great
| pseudoscience of this 'computer science' thinking is that
| abstracts to a degree of description that is almost
| universal, then claims to make fine-grained distinctions.
|
| That the earth-and-moon are 2, and the tree-and-bird are 2,
| does not mean the earth-and-sun and the tree-and-bird are
| sharing in any capacities at all. To instantiate an abstract
| description implies almost nothing.
| danwills wrote:
| Yes I agree there's little point in instantiating arbitrary
| abstract structures, however that isn't what I was
| suggesting. The related structures and properties
| identified in Levin's work are specifically those of the
| 'agential' type (going from molecular-networks/cellular
| scale right up to and past human-level): Goal-following
| meta-rules is what would be in the 'class', not just
| measurements or information attached/correlated to
| something because some numbers happen to be equal, but a
| type of memory of intrinsic meta-self-serving micro-
| behaviors that actually do inform the micro-elements how to
| behave.
|
| I think that self-organization creates the possibility for
| the natural nucleation of agential-behavior (akin to
| crystal-formation) and when the system is also replicative
| overall, it might cause itself to happen again too! (and
| down the rabbit-hole we go!)
|
| And I wonder whether it's really ok to just claim there is
| no micro-organizational structure that gives rise to this
| meta-goal-following, I mean, this is what Levin's work is
| all about! My own consciousness/'intelligence' is brought
| about by many smaller agents (my cells), and I think
| there's really no sharp categorical barrier here - goal-
| seeking (and hitting, for the winners of evolution) are
| pretty clear strategies from the molecular-scale to the
| blue-whale-sized (and humans too I reckon!)
| mjburgess wrote:
| If you mean to say that materials which have the property
| of self-replication with variation are essential to
| intelligence, then I agree with you.
|
| One finds, in reality, that crystals do not meet this
| requirement -- the only known chemistry to provide it is
| a highly specific subtype of carbon chemistry called
| biology.
| danwills wrote:
| Yeah I think we are mostly on the same page for sure, I
| would nearly go so far as to say that self-replicating
| with variation is 'essential' for intelligence.. and I do
| utterly love evolution as an idea - but maybe it's just
| what happened-to-produce the main examples of
| intelligence we've observed so far in recent history on
| Earth? (personally I don't think it's just humans that
| are intelligent either though! so many animals and
| probably other things are extremely smart too! Just very
| hard to measure!)
|
| And yeah I was only using the idea of a crystal as an
| analogy, all replicators (all life?) is a bit like a kind
| of smooshy-space-and-time-crystal in a way though right?
| Especially the multicellular kind!!
|
| It's the regeneration/continuation of information of who-
| knows what type? All types! Obviously there's genes and
| Levin's vmem and other epigenetic stuff on the
| biological-side, but now there's also youtube, video-
| games, recipes, traditions? all memetic-replicators, or
| meta-memetic ones that control which other memes you
| allow in your life? I like to remember that all of them
| are subject to the rules-of-evolution too - there's a
| success for the memes themselves if they are getting us
| to carrying them forward!! Can be wildly different types
| of memories accross epic amounts of time too? Bloody
| amazing to think about I reckon! Evolution FTW!
| synctext wrote:
| > The great pseudoscience of this 'computer science'
| thinking
|
| You spelled Nobel-level science wrong.
|
| Most of Levin work is not easy to understand or appreciate.
| Our university lab has been doing cooperative intelligence
| for decades. The insight in some of his work is
| revolutionary. He shows why randomness is much more
| intelligent then most scientist think.
| danwills wrote:
| I just loved this bit in the paper, could be so easily taken on
| so many tangents!:
|
| ""Delayed Gratification is used to evaluate the ability of each
| algorithm undertake actions that temporarily increase
| Monotonicity Error in order to achieve gains later on. Delayed
| Gratification is defined as the improvement in Sortedness made by
| a temporarily error-increasing action.""
|
| Is it slightly analogous in some ways to the avoidance of getting
| stuck in local maxima perhaps?
| vindex10 wrote:
| Or maybe the fact that the path of minimal effort != sequence
| of paths with locally simplest steps.
| danwills wrote:
| I'd love to know more about what you mean!
|
| Is it that with a bit more upfront investment (or 'delayed
| gratification'), a system might be able to find shorter (or
| less energy-intensive) paths through the space that they are
| navigating to get to their targets?
|
| I think it certainly does seem like when there is essentially
| some 'computational slack' ('extra line' say, slightly over-
| provisioned or just set-to-explore more) I'd guess there's a
| good chance that that could yield a better (cheaper/shorter)
| result than a brute-force (minimal-effort, perhaps more
| technically 'efficient') solution?
|
| Unfortunately I don't really feel like I really went anywhere
| with what I said, but your very short comment made me wonder
| many things about what you meant! Appreciated!
| danwills wrote:
| I loved this paper, below is the punchline for me I reckon (and
| summarizes where-they-are-at nicely too I think - finding out a
| lot of possibly very important things!):
|
| ""The discovery of unexpected problem-solving competencies (such
| as Delayed Gratification and segregation) that are not apparent
| from the component policies and algorithms themselves is a
| critical research program.""
| trenchgun wrote:
| Are these just traditional distributed algorithms?
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