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A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.I found Stephen Wolfram's talks about complexity and computation extremely rewarding.
In that respect Stephen Wolfram's book "A new kind of science" is kind of interesting. It explores the laws of nature by ignoring the ones we have, instead coupling a numbering system to all possible sets of natural laws, and simulating the resulting universe. It does seem to indicate that what you're saying is wrong. The vast majority of combinations of physical constants would never lead to complexity, and whatever form life takes, I think we can agree a minimum level of complexity is a necessity. That minimum level is quite substantial.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eC14GonZnU
Most "laws" immediately lead to a universe with a uniform energy level throughout, or lead to complete absense of matter and total darkness. No matter how life adapts, it can't adapt to that. Less common are oscillating universes, that evolve in an entirely predictable periodic pattern. The remainder is mostly total randomness, static. None of these will support life. But ... then there are a few interesting ones.
It would be very interesting to explore more of this space. Does "rule 110" contain life ? (it's Turing-complete and chaotic, so it "contains" hello world and windows 95 ... does it contain you & me ?)
The Copernican principle is mostly a very useful discipline tool. When you see something weird, whether it's a measurement or output from a computer program, your initial reaction should not be "it's a cosmic ray !", "a coincidence !", or "a miracle !" because it isn't. It's something that's part of the behavior of the measured system. That should be your base assumption. It's a bug, it's a loose wire, it's ..., not a cosmic ray/random/miracle. That's the Copernican principle.
But that is entirely different from saying cosmic rays/random chance/miracles don't happen at all. In fact, I'd say it almost proves they do, as we've all seen a program that behaves one way on 9999 out of 10000 cores and yet fucks up on the last one. At some point you just have to give up on Copernicus, and say "Something flipped that (&#@$(#@$ bit, and it wasn't me". It simply shouldn't be your first assumption.
As I've seen it put on a colleague's desk :
It's perfectly explainable
Your calculation is wrong
You're reading the wrong file
You're reading the right file in the wrong directory
You're reading the right file in the right directory on the wrong disk
You're looking at the wrong tab
You're looking at the wrong side of the screen
You're attempting to execute a C++ program with the python interpreter
Your "float" is an integer
You're reading the file, but overwriting the variable before you calculate on it
You're reading correctly, but overwriting the variable after you calculate on it
That if says the opposite of what you think it says
You have overwritten your input file
You have overwritten your output file
Your matlab licence has expired
(it goes on for quite a bit more, but you get the gist)