[Haskell-cafe] Rather off topic: An ab initio universe simulation?

[Tom Nielsen]

You can do all sorts of fun things with computers. Assuming that you
are interested in modeling really real life, how will you estimate
parameters (e.g. mutation rates) based on real data? How will you
quantify whether this a good or a bad model? I think living in a
fact-free world is a bit pointless, but there are plenty of people who
got tenure that way... There's tons of this stuff in Artificial Life
and a book with that title by Stephen Levy which make many grand
claims.

Tom

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
>
> In order to simulate nature, you need to have the mutation and selection
> process itself be part of the programs (and not the interpreter).
>
> How about you have a "world" consisiting of some memory, bombard this
> world with "cosmic radiation", and add some "enzymatic activity" in the
> form of an interpreter that interprets a location of the world as a
> simple language (that allows observation and modification of the world,
> as well as forking new threads of execution) - which is randomly started
> at random points.
>
> After some time, you might have threads that reproduce themselves,
> perhaps forming species, cooperation, pathogens, genders, and if you
> wait four billion years, civilizations...
>
> Life is really just core wars without the programmers :-)
>
> -k
> --
> If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
>
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