Jeff Beck: belief

Transcript context

…it's in the same class of algorithms. Yeah. But there seems to be you you know, a a cellular automata that has this emergentist thing. So what does is not how it's programmed and it feels like there's a trick that the way it's programmed is an order of magnitude less complicated than the thing it does. Right. So if it was like a magical bridge to do stuff which is more complicated than we could explicitly program or learn. I agree, but that also sounds a lot like a computer. Know, it's like, well, what can you do with like a lot of Now I guess the difference between a computer and a cellular automata is that a computer, you know, you program it, you tell it exactly, like you specify something. Whereas in a cellular automata, the way that you're training if you're training it to do something in particular, like so for example, find a bunch of discrete objects that go in a certain direction, and then you're allowed to, like, tweak the rules that govern the local interactions until you get something that more or less does that. That's just programming in a sort of backhanded way. Yeah. But I think that's, I mean, those systems are very interesting because it is remarkable that really dumb simple rules, right, can lead to like really interesting sophisticated behavior. But the thing that I find interesting though, isn't the fact that like like complicated, you know, complicated stuff can result from like simple local rules. What I find interesting, what I'm more interested in rather is like, well, what are what are the properties of the resulting large scale objects? Right? Is that how is that related to the small scale objects? What's the mathematical description of those big things? The things that the things that are that have emerged. I'm less concern less interested in how they precisely emerge. This probably is because of my bias towards taking a a human cognitive approach. Most of the people don't act you you know, when you look at the game of life, when most people think, that's really cool. Like, look at these pretty pictures and all these little creatures, and they're doing fun things. They don't really care about the low level rules. Right? The thing that captures their imagination is the macroscopic the the high level, the macroscopic level behavior of these things. Though it is cool that you can get them from simple rules. Yes. Yes. No. As as you say, we can program computers, but there's the legibility ceiling. We could do program synthesis. Doesn't work very well.…

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