Schmidhuber has forgotten to cite Leibniz. The results in this document are nothing more than a trivial corollary of the principle of metaphysical efficiency, not to mention pre-established harmony, which Leibniz has discovered the most general forms of in 1710, which encompasses not only the construction of the physical universe, but also morality. See <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/" rel="nofollow">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/</a>.
"Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers. If our own universe allowed for enough storage, enough time, and fault-free computing, then you could be one of them."<p>Loved that line.<p>I do not understand this main point of the article. Perhaps someone can explain?<p>"On the
other hand, computing just one particular universe’s evolution (with, say, one particular instance of noise), without computing the others, tends to be very expensive, because almost all individual universes are incompressible, as has been shown above. More is less!"<p>It seems the point is that the program to compute all universes is short, while the program to compute one particular universe is long. But surely runtime is greater in the former?
In this vein, I strongly recommend Scott Aaronson's Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity <a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf</a>
We've just been Schmidhubered! There's also this paper from 2009 :<p>> "Ultimate Cognition a la Godel" <a href="http://www.brainmaster.com/software/pubs/math/Godel%20machine.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.brainmaster.com/software/pubs/math/Godel%20machin...</a>
"More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with
the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care.
...
From the view of the Great Programmer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”."<p>Interesting points, especially to follow up the recent 'is matter conscious?' article on HN.<p>Schmidhuber often seems to be more of a philosopher who happens to have made significant practical contributions to machine learning. The 'Great Programmer' is intentionally tongue-and-cheek, but for the agnostics out there, it's worth considering that regardless of what creator/process/fundamental mathematical requirement (if any) is responsible for the existence of our universe, it is unlikely that life on Earth (or perhaps in general) is relevant to <i>It</i>.
> It can be shown that there is no algorithm that can generate the shortest program for computing arbitrary given data on a given computer [2, 9, 1]. In particular, our physicists cannot expect to find the most compact description of our universe.<p>This seems wrong to me. There exists no general algorithm to find the shortest program to compute arbitrary data, but we can surely find specific shortest programs to compute arbitrary data.
I'm actually working on a project that explores the concept of information storage / movement duality to create life.<p><a href="https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/" rel="nofollow">https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/</a><p>Send an email to the address listed in my profile if you'd like to be a part of the project.
I wonder who supplied the great programmer with the Turing machine in the first place. What separates Turing machines from mincing machines in that context? And an important premise is an implied equivalence of an infinite sequence of states with infinite states. "Before" the world creation there is not "time" per se. So how is the Turing machine, where sequence plays a pivotal role, supposed to work in that exo-time context?
42 comments right now. What a strange coincidence. Had to say it.<p>Here it is: <a href="http://imgur.com/a/wGdGz" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/wGdGz</a>
If time doesn't matter to the Great Programmer, does efficiency ?
Would He be indifferent on P vs NP or more generalized questions of that nature ?