I think a lot of people are mistaking a “cell” in this universe for being comparable to… I guess a “cell” in biology, or something, and comparing each step in the program to… I don’t know what people are thinking exactly here (a second?). But I think for comparison to our physics (and any kind of biology or intelligence that we would care about), each cell is a quark, and each tick is equivalent to a Planck time. This doesn’t make the sentient creatures we’re hypothesizing big and slow, it just means they’re the same size and speed that we are.
No, I was mostly agreeing with you, except to reframe the comparison as “an intelligenct creature would be the same size that they are in our universe. As far as we’re concerned, we’re normal sized, and quarks are small.”
I also address the “it’s so SLOW!” comment I saw a few other places. There was no single comment that made the most sense to reply to, and I figured I might as well tie the comments together since I saw them as related.
My memory is evidently playing tricks with me. I could have sworn I heard about someone constructing a replicator maybe about a year or 2 ago, and that it was all over the internet. But now when I try to look things up what I find agrees with you that no replicator has yet been constructed. Does anyone know what I might have been thinking of?
(Of course, now we’re discussing replicators, whereas the question was about imperfect replicators, but that falls much under the same boat—definitely possible, almost certainly not yet constructed.)
An AI would iikely be made out of small, stupid stable configurations.
Quarks ⇒ Atoms ⇒ Molecules ⇒ Polymers ⇒ Cells ⇒ Bigger Cells ⇒ Brains ⇒ Living Things
An intelligent creature could be HUGE.
and some other post:
I think a lot of people are mistaking a “cell” in this universe for being comparable to… I guess a “cell” in biology, or something, and comparing each step in the program to… I don’t know what people are thinking exactly here (a second?). But I think for comparison to our physics (and any kind of biology or intelligence that we would care about), each cell is a quark, and each tick is equivalent to a Planck time. This doesn’t make the sentient creatures we’re hypothesizing big and slow, it just means they’re the same size and speed that we are.
Does my post give you the impression that I was mistaking a cell for being something like a cell in our universe?
No, I was mostly agreeing with you, except to reframe the comparison as “an intelligenct creature would be the same size that they are in our universe. As far as we’re concerned, we’re normal sized, and quarks are small.”
I also address the “it’s so SLOW!” comment I saw a few other places. There was no single comment that made the most sense to reply to, and I figured I might as well tie the comments together since I saw them as related.
Related noob question:
Are there patterns in Life than can reproduce themselves reliably but imperfectly? (i.e. does life exist in Life?)
Do we actually have an example of such a pattern? (That was what I meant my question to be)
No—just the proof. Recentish progress here.
EDIT: Disregard this comment. I found what I was thinking of and it isn’t in any way a replicator. It was this: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini
My memory is evidently playing tricks with me. I could have sworn I heard about someone constructing a replicator maybe about a year or 2 ago, and that it was all over the internet. But now when I try to look things up what I find agrees with you that no replicator has yet been constructed. Does anyone know what I might have been thinking of?
(Of course, now we’re discussing replicators, whereas the question was about imperfect replicators, but that falls much under the same boat—definitely possible, almost certainly not yet constructed.)
Is this what you were thinking of?
I already posted it above but that’s the same thing, yes.
Ah, the problem seems to be bad summaries by the popular articles.