Fundamental Compressionist Philosophy.

[Gerry Wolff]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Detlef Morgenstern" <detlef_morgenstern at yahoo.de>
To: "casc mail list" <casc at sanna.com>
Sent: 22 May 2001 01:11
Subject: Re: Fundamental Compressionist Philosophy.


> -- Does a falling stone compute? --
>
> Yes. It represents a complex network of differential equations
> reflecting these physical phenomena:
> - cinematics
> - gravity
> - principle of the conservation of energy
> - aerodynamics
> and - if fast enough -
> - thermodynamics, gas dynamics, and optics.
>

I am not really convinced by this idea and the similar one (that you hear
sometimes) that "the world is just one big computer". The latter idea may
have been inspired by demonstrations of virtual reality. If you see a
demonstration like that, it is tempting to think that the world itself is a
giant simulation of -- itself!

When a stone falls, the differential equations are not in the stone or in
the falling process: they are in our mental conceptions of the falling
stone. We do the computing in our brains to "make sense" of what is
happening. The stone just falls.

To do computing with a Turing machine you need a tape, a read-write head
etc. To do computing with an ICMAUS system, you need systems for matching
patterns, building multiple alignments etc. But none of these things are in
a falling stone or in the world in general. They may be found in parts of
the world (eg the process of biological evolution may be seen as a kind of
computing) but they don't seem to exist in things like falling stones.

> I can imagine computing without compression, if computing is
> understood as
> 'I give a (request) pattern to my computer, and my computer returns a
> (response) pattern.'

My current view is that the process of matching the request to the stored
pattern includes an implicit unification the request pattern with (part of)
the requested pattern and this (normally) means information compression. Of
course, there is plenty of room for argument here, especially about the word
'implicit'.

>
> It is difficult to imagine computing without programming.
>
> I can imagine programming without compression:
> Put all the desired request->reply associations into your computer,
> say, as a large lookup table (which is a kind of trivial 'training').
>
> It is difficult to imagine an *efficient* way of programming which
> has nothing to do with compression.
>

Yes, I agree. A simple way to program a robot arm is to get a skilled
operator to move the 'hand' through the correct movements (eg painting a
car) and then to store information about the positions of all the joints at
each microsecond during the operation. The stored information seems to be an
example of "programming without compression": it can be used to guide the
arm so that it imitates the original sequence of movements.

When the program is executed, the process of applying the stored values may
be seen as a process which involves matching and unification of patterns
and, hence, information compression.

If the sequence of movements included repetitions of the same movement, it
would be very natural to reduce the repetition to a single instance and put
it inside a 'while' loop or a 'for' loop. This is how the program may come
to be compressed.

Thanks for these ideas. I hope you will not mind me disagreeing with the one
about stones. But I agree with the point about programming without
compression.

Best wishes,

Gerry