From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Sun Nov 22 1998 - 16:51:34 MST
In a message dated 11/22/98 4:34:33 PM, Nick Bostrom wrote:
>Hal Finney wrote:
>
>> they ran into balancing problems, where trivial
>> strategies would dominate (often a problem with alife simulations).
>> At last report they were introducing various ad hoc rules and limitations
>> to try to get robust evolutionary behavior.
>
>At this most basic level, complexity or growth in compexity does
>certainly not seem to be the most likely or natural situation. But
>since it's boring (for the human psychology) we change the parameters
>until we get something interesting. I makes me wonder if we may not
>be prone to overestimate the likelihood that the far future will be
>complex.
I expect that it will be complex. Complexity is thermodynamically
favorable - it's simplicity that's hard.
In the wild speculation department, I wonder if part of the reason
that Alife has a problem with trivial strategies arises because
alife doesn't generally try to deal with thermodynamics. Hence
they're not modelling one of the biggest drives to complexity.
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