Blaise Agüera y Arcas: prediction

Transcript context

…1 thing I find fascinating that you've thought a lot about, Blaise, is where the purpose comes from. Folks like Half Wriston, for example, they have a no nonsense physics interpretation that is the second law of thermodynamics at the end of the day. Because there's some notion of valence that we build these complex adaptive systems, and there needs to be something that drives them forward, something that propels them in a certain direction. And your experiments have shown that this kind of falls out of computation. What do you mean by that? Yes. And to be clear, computation and the second law very much work together here. So, the the experiment that that, that I did a couple of years ago that I I that that really sort of, you know, got me started with with artificial life is called BFF. It's it's based on a language called brain fuck, which is where the first BFF come from. I didn't I didn't name it that. Although I admit, I was, you know, I enjoyed that that it was called that. But this is a a minimal Turing complete language, designed by, by a by a grad student. I think he was a grad student in physics, Urbain Miller in the nineties. It's a very minimal language. It has only only 8 instructions. I only use 7 of them. And the basic setup is that I begin with a bunch of tapes of length 64. So just 64 byte long tapes like those Turing tapes or or or or Von Neumann's tapes. They start off filled with random bytes. There are only 7 instructions, so the great majority of those bytes, about 31 out of 32 of them are no ops, meaning that they don't they don't code for any instruction at all. So they start off random and very much purposeless. You have a thousand of them in your soup, and the procedure is really simple. It's just plucking 2 of those tapes at random out of the soup, sticking them end to end, so you make 1 tape that is a 128 long, and then running it. And this modification of brain fuck is self modifying, meaning that when you run it, it can modify values on on that combined tape. And then pulling the tapes back apart and dropping them back in the soup and that's it. And you just repeat that process. If you do that a few million times, you start off with nothing much going on. I mean, again, you know, the huge majority of those of those bites are not even instructions. They're only an average of 2 of them or so on each tape, so the likelihood of them doing anything is almost 0. You know, you might once in a while see 1 bite somewhere change. But, after a few million interactions, something apparently magical happens, which is that, suddenly the entropy of the soup drops dramatically, so it goes from being incompressible because it's all random bytes to being very highly compressible and programs emerge on those tapes. And those programs are are complex, they they take some real effort to reverse engineer and and you can see that they are they're occurring in a lot of copies. That's why it's compressible. The fact that they're occurring in a lot of copies tells you what the programs are doing. They're they're reproducing. They're copying themselves. So, you know, what's so cool about this experiment is that it really shows you how life emerges from nothing. And and the emergence of life is in some sense the emergence of purpose. You know, in this case, you know, what is the purpose of 1 of these programs? Well, it is to reproduce. e emerges from nothing. And and the emergence of life is in some sense the emergence of purpose. You know, in this case, you know, what is the purpose of 1 of these programs? Well, it is to reproduce. If you were to mess with 1 of those bytes, if you were to change it, you would in most cases break the program and when you break the program, it no longer functions to reproduce. So, you know, something that can break is something that is functional or that has purpose.…

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