simpleton comments on Brief question about Conway's Game of LIfe and AI - Less Wrong

13 [deleted] 02 June 2011 02:51AM

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Comment author: simpleton 02 June 2011 09:34:00PM -1 points [-]

Conway’s Game of Life is Turing-complete. Therefore, it is possible to create an AI in it. If you created a 3^^3 by 3^^3 Life board, setting the initial state at random, presumably somewhere an AI would be created.

I don't think Turing-completeness implies that.

Consider the similar statement: "If you loaded a Turing machine with a sufficiently long random tape, and let it run for enough clock ticks, an AI would be created." This is clearly false: Although it's possible to write an AI for such a machine, the right selection pressures don't exist to produce one this way; the machine is overwhelmingly likely to just end up in an uninteresting infinite loop.

Likewise, the physics of Life are most likely too impoverished to support the evolution of anything more than very simple self-replicating patterns.

Comment author: benelliott 02 June 2011 09:47:26PM 6 points [-]

If AI is possible in Life then a sufficiently large random field will almost certainly contain one. Whether it will have enough of an advantage to beat the simple self replicators and crystalline growing patterns for dominance of the entire field is another question.