Manfred comments on My Wild and Reckless Youth - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 August 2007 01:52AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (51)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 October 2012 03:27:19AM 1 point [-]

Whereas with evolution, I'd predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together...

I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural). But I'd expect that in a tiny minority of cases things like Fisherian Runaway, complex signalling and just plain luck happen to throw some individual toward the 'general intelligence' path (and a bunch of other deal breaking to not happen on the way). I'd expect any intelligent agents to observe that they are on a planet, in a galaxy in an Everett Branch where life had evolved much like you said.

Comment author: Manfred 08 October 2012 10:41:16AM *  0 points [-]

I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural).

One might compare this to ecosystems of reproducing known-number iterated prisoner's dilemma robots - the analogous idea is that these ecosystems will usually end up as "tit for tat goo."

Tit for tat is reliable. Like algae in the sea of early earth, tit for tat can serve as a "background" for our ecosystem - cooperation is harvesting energy from the sun, defection is being a predator, but if everyone tries to be a predator everyone dies. So algae reproduces. But also like a sea full of algae, there are predatory / parasitic strategies that work really well once the plants are common, like defecting at the end, or eating plants. If a tit for tat robot has the first mutant baby that defects at the end, that baby will only play against tit for tat robots, so it will defect successfully and have more babies than usual, eventually leading to a whole new strain. The zooplankton of the ecosystem. But then if that becomes common, it may be worth it to produce a parasite to the parasite - defecting twice from the end. The bigger the possible rewards, the more layers of strategies will be viable. Tit for tat goo is unstable - plants quickly grow herbivores, and herbivores can sometimes grow predators.

And that's just iterated prisoner's dilemma. Add in more dimensions, multiple equilibria... things could get pretty complicated.