On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 12:16:06PM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > Another question here would be who will divide the state space to a > bacterium and environment. Let us imagine that we have implemented > somehow a bacterium in Game of Life (or even better in Continuous > Game of Life). What is meaning of "A bacterium travels" when there > is no human observer? > > Or let me can put it this way. To find out whether a bacterium is > there and to find out its coordinates, one could imagine an extra > algorithms that analyses the state space of for example Continuous > Game of Life. Now we run two different simulations. > > 1) Continuous Game of Life as it is. > > 2) Continuous Game of Life with an extra algorithm to find out if a > bacterium is there and to report coordinates of the bacterium. > > Is there any difference between 1) and 2)? >
A very pertinent question. I wish I knew the answer (myself and many others too!). There is a sort of proto-answer in the work of Jim Crutchfield. It is possible (sort of) to come up with a workable definition of emergence that doesn't require the presence of an observer (or rather he has a metric to indicate what sorts of things are likely to be interesting to an abstract observer - my emphasis). Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
