[lioeters]

This article and your comment reminded me of something Stephen Wolfram was saying about "mining" the latent space of, in his case, cellular automata as a computational medium. A quick search yields this somewhat older talk: Mining the Computational Universe https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/mining-computati...

That phrasing and analogy stuck in my mind, of looking at the space of all possible programs as a resource to be explored for valuable nuggets of algorithms. Your description of interpolating between two functions gives me a similar perspective, of seeing algorithms not only as discrete and separate objects/processes, but "slices" of a larger space, the continuum of computation.

What the article is describing seems to me like "slices of semantic space", not just similar on the surface, but it's actually talking about the same space explored using different tools and lenses.

[Teever]

I recently came across a video of the author discussing this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05375

I’ve been mulling it over the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure what to make of it.

[lioeters]

Here's a Lex Fridman interview discussing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr1sNYY2t9A

I'm a fan of Michael Levin's work, a biologist and philosopher riding that edge between genius and mad science. In the interview he mentions how behavioral psychology may be a useful tool in studying the behavior of algorithms and other phenomena typically not associated with having a mind of its own.