Eric writes: "I like chemistry as a medium, because the state space itself supports a lot of complexity, and the temporal variability of reactions, plus the fact that catalytic relations exist, offer large separations of timescales that can be used to fill functional classes like memories."
One could imagine coupling a physical simulation to a search procedure for functional behaviors like memories and doorways. The detection combinatorics would be challenging, assuming the physical simulation were possible at sufficient fidelity, but perhaps could be constrained by virtue of spatial locality. I don't know much about coarse-graining organic chemistry simulators. For comparison, with molecular dynamics a billion atoms is possible (on a budget of a few megawatts), but not for more than tens of nanoseconds. I've found game physics engines like Bullet Physics are nice for coarse-grained models because they are fast (optimized to graphics processors) and easy to interleave control or detection logic. However, they couldn't (without more work) decompose the space across memory domains of a cluster. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
