[rules to be found] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS ForumA New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum
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rules to be found
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Posted by: KarlGamer
I know that, most likely, there will never be found a rule that produces a picture of a human body. I think.
But I am sure that there will be some rules found to describe certain aspects of Biology.
That being said looking at all these black and white boxes makes me think of looking at the rules to a board game in another language with out the board.
It must be hard for us to find the correct board and rules.
We have the boards. We have what we think we know about the universe.
So the rules must be discovered and there is not clear idea of how they should be read.
That’s all I have.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
A rule for the human body shape has not yet been found, certainly. And one may doubt how far down the details can go in a simple rule to describe body shape.
But we call it "the human body" for a reason. There are billions of them, not one. They just share something in common - the same overall plan or layout, coming from the same underlying genetics. We abstract from individual developmental variations. We abstract even from genetic variation occuring within the species. For the basic body plan, we'd be willing to abstract from variation even within mammals, if we e.g. found a rule that gave us the basic bilateral symmetry, the limb structure, etc. We already know that there is such a unity - we see it, and we call it mammalian or human body structure, rather than Joe's body structure. Which means there are definite rules operating uniformly across the instances, producing the uniformity we see.
The only question is how complicated those definite rules are. Before NKS, we might have thought to produce such a body plan, which clearly is not produced by one differential equation or geometrical form, we'd need scads of coordinated rules, much as we seen scads of interconnected parts in a car blueprint, say. What we've seen in NKS is that at least some of the subsystems involved might be considerably less complicated than that, at the level of the generating rule creating the form seen.
We can see that in e.g. a set of simple rules with just a couple of parameters, that can reproduce a whole range of leaf shapes. When we say "shapes," we are talking about an abstraction that is simpler than the whole biologicial reality of the leaf. But it is plausible that nature is making use of a simple program to generate the form we specify by those abstractions. Similarly, there might be a developmental rule that produces basic body structures, with a few parameters. It would only account for the basic shape. But it might well be the rule nature actually uses over and over to generate the stable unity we see across many instances.
I hope this is interesting.
Posted by: KarlGamer
Well, I sometimes imagine as in a Science Fiction story that, by coming up with a new simple program, I will see some picture of something I will automatically know.
Like the human body or a bunny hopping through snow or… anything.
Now I realize that, however imaginative and hopeful, is just plain silly. I think.
However, what is seen, from a simple program, could be more amazing than a picture and could be a lot more informative.
But how are we (am I) to understand the things we produce.
“I know this is somehow important… what does it mean?”
Posted by: Jason Cawley
Oh I get you now. Sort of like in the NKS book, the note on page 1190L, about bitmap images sent by Arecibo as an attempted "wow" signal from us to anybody listening. If you read that note ("messages to send", starts on p. 1189R), it talks about how much context is needed to recognize anything like that.
Posted by: KarlGamer
Yes!
I suppose that it is a silly, somewhat romantic, thought that realistic pictures of commonly known forms will appear from the output of a simple program.
After all there is no sentient being that is secretly hiding messages inside the mysterious realms of mankind’s logic.
But mystery is somewhat romantic.
And I am sure that there are really beautiful things to be found.
How can we tell what is beautiful, if it isn’t clearly beautiful.
Once during a lecture Carl Sagan was told that he “sucked the beauty out of a rose.”
Carl Sagan believed that because of how much he knew about the rose it was a lot more beautiful.
Since we don’t have a rose to tempt us farther how do we know to look?
Does a simple program by any other name smell as sweet?
Posted by: Richard Smith
Extrapolating from the ongoing discussion... see the examples on my web site: Ray-trace images derived from simple initial conditions driven by a "rule". The images are generally more organic (than CA) and sometimes vaguely familiar.
http://home.pe.net/~rmsmith/rttext.html
Follow the link near the end of the text.
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