[ExI] Survival (was: elections again)

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Wed Jan 2 17:54:30 UTC 2008


On Wednesday 02 January 2008, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 10:48:06PM -0600, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> > Instead of that simple algorithm, perhaps talking about lateral
> > thought or lateral integration would be more appropriate?
>
> I must admit that term doesn't ring a bell. Can you expand?

Doesn't matter. You get it, re: your "Very true" later.

> > > > the environment lacks requisite variety, then the "recursively
> > >
> > > Most of the environment are other invididuals. That's where the
> > > complexity is.
> >
> > That's locally accessible complexity, but have you ever tried
> > asking your neighbor for their brain? Not so accessible, is it? :)
>
> I meant the component of the fitness function that is not you nor
> the habitat, but others you share the habitat with.

That's interesting, especially in the context of:

> > > You'll notice ecosystems don't do huge individuals, and that's
> > > not a coincidence.
> >
> > Google.
>
> Even though corporations are not a good model of ecosystems, Google
> is not the single search machine vendor. All scenarios involving
> singletons must not only account for the narrowest possible
> population bottleneck, but also the mechanisms maintaining a
> zero-diversity monoclone henceforth. Notice that you can't
> synchronize monoclones in a relativistic universe even for very small

That last line has implications for all sorts of juicy, synchronous 
situations, including stream-of-consciousness and one man teams. What 
component of the fitness function do the neighbors represent, in these 
terms?

> spatial dimensions. The bigger you get, the slower you'll get. This
> also assumes the environment has zero diversity, so the system must
> apply diversity forcing to the environment. If that sounds like a
> nice horror novel, that's because it has a great potential for one.

Why would external diversity be required to sustain a zero-diversity 
monoclone?

> Tons of it. Drexler, Merkle, Freitas, Sandberg & Co have published a
> lot on it. http://nanomedicine.com/ is a good starter, but I would
> expect you knew all about that site.

In truth, I have been avoiding that group (Drexler/Merkle/Freitas) for 
too long because their research is mostly inaccessible to me, in terms 
of actually downloading PDFs. Maybe I'll try grabbing the articls from 
the nanotech journal alerts you send to tt.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/



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