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Emergent Systems

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Ulciscor:
Well since everyone has been quite zen lately in the discussion about artificial laws and the emergence of complex systems from a simple set of rules, I have been thinking a lot.

In a lecture today I had an idea, which may well be already known or discussed, or indeed already in practice. But what the hey.

Why not first define an environment in terms of substances and physics, and then impose some rules for how these substances interact. This would be the only artificial rule-making and if it were modelled after real-life then wouldn't be artificial at all, simply a simplification of reality.

You could then add bots (composed of environmental substances) and define all their behaviours as manipulations of the environment.

You wouldn't need rules for their behaviour as they would already be defined from the basic interactions of the environment and its components.

This would also allow new behaviours to be introduces without the problem of them being artificially engineered. In fact, if DNA were remade so that actions were based on the manipulation of substances, all possible behaviours the bot could do would be described.

Does this make ANY sense? It does to me but I'm not too good at describing it.  :(

Also I'm sorry if this has already been suggested or discussed elsewhere; if that's the case then someone can delete this thread and point me in the direction of the old one.

PurpleYouko:
You are actually describing what I have been saying all along.

The complexity needs to be in the way the bots interact with the world, in physical laws and so on.

Such a program would be cool beyond belief but unfortunately, incredibly tricky to set up.

The bots themselves would also need to be very complex to enable them to interact with the world.

Ulciscor:

--- Quote ---You are actually describing what I have been saying all along.
--- End quote ---

Oops! Sorry [PY] maybe I had the same flash on insight as you did. Just after a sizable delay.


Why would it be tricky to set up? Wouldn't you just need rules for physics and entity interactions? The rest would sort itself out.

PurpleYouko:
On the face of it yes.

But what rules of physics and chemistry would you plan to use and which ones would you leave out.

During my Chemistry degree I learned hundreds of rules governing specific chemical reactions and what is scarier is that I also learned that there are close to an infinite number of other specific rules that we didn't even cover on the course.
Beyond that, there are probaly hundreds of times more interactions that we don't even know about than there are ones that have been discovered.

Then there is physics.  :blink:

Where do we draw the line? We can't possibly do it all.

What we are left with is a stylized and greatly simplified system which we can impose on our world. Not reality but possibly a close approximation. Maybe not. Perhaps it's better not to even attempt to reproduce real world stuff. Take DB shots and ties. They have no real world counterpart.

Anyway, we have our world now so how do we allow our creatures to interact with it. How do they move, eat, see, reproduce? They can never learn to do it on their own because we haven't yet hard programmed the possibilities into our universe.

In order for a collection of chemicals inside a little membrane to be able to self replicate, there has to be a physical mechanism (chunk of program code) to allow it. There has to be something within the creature that instigates it. There has to be something to control the outcome etc. etc. etc.

You see the problem is that for every action that the creatures can possibly ever take, the world has to be set up to deal with it. If it just wants to rotate 90 degrees, we have to have a section of code specifically designed to allow that to happen.

Maybe somebody else can see a way to make a totally rule-less system but I just can't see any way we can do it.

I would love to try it though.  :D

Greven:
But the difference from Ulciscor and PY thought is:
I understand perfectly what Ulciscor is saying, while you PY have been vague in describing your ideas (no offense).
And--->
ULCISCOR that is exctractly what I am thinking!!!!!!!!!

Ulciscor's ideas = PY's ideas = Greven's ideas => PERFECT

It seems we all see it the same way, but have explain them differently, and we therefore have misunderstood each other.

Ulciscor, you have the power of the written text, or what ever I should call it! Thank you!

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