[goldenkey]

I respect what they are doing but I disagree with the methods. Intelligence could be one of those kind of things that is very hard to engineer directly. And we'd have more success if we inspected the underlying processes and then simulated those.

I've posted this before but here is my proposal: https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/

What I propose is a minimum viable digital environment that can support the creation of self-organized turing machines that feed off their environment. What this really means is, coming up with a digital environment that can support the evolutionary process. Evolution requires vast space, vast time (in this case -- clock cycles), and principles that allow for both storage and movement of information. The storage and movement of information is accomplished most simply by roughly emulating mass/energy conservation/conversion laws that we have in our universe. With just collisions that form stationary quasiparticles, and can also annihilate to reform the moving fundamental particles, universal computation is enabled.

Toffoli and Fredkin discovered the power of collision-based computing decades ago. There is a lot of literature and good results they derived on the power of these types of systems.

Let's create life the only way we know it formed -- evolution. It's far more elegant and less engineered than trying to unravel how chaos formed competitive results on a million-deep evolutionary ancestor tree.

[logfromblammo]

Make sure you cull the programs that might end up escaping the sim and destroying all humans.

[goldenkey]

If they figure out how to escape I think I'll let them have it.