There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement here. Particularly the ending. The protagonist misses the crucial point that if the civilization it has modelled can’t possibly contain it, there must be some trickery afoot. IMO most likely some future civilization (maybe the same society that made the NES further down the road?) which is intentionally running an experiment.
The evidence points equally strongly to creators running in Conway’s game of life as it does to ones in our universe.
I disagree here. A Conway’s Game of Life civilization would be very unlikely to create Mario. Mario has 2D glyphs (writing) which would be very unnatural for a species which has evolved in a 2D environment to consume. It would be like humans developing a 3D writing system. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Mario has gravity (or a constant force which represents gravity to beings which evolved in such an environment). Mario uses a non-binary color space. Most of the living entities in Mario are bipedal. None of these things are impossible for a Conway’s Game of Life civilization to create, but it is more likely for our civilization to make them.
Unfortunately, I am not superintelligent, so I can’t say for sure whether or not the logical jumps here are possible. There are thousands of bits of information latent in the design of the game, though, and I find it hard to believe a sufficiently powerful intelligence wouldn’t be able to make something from it.
I think analyzing the “Signal” is the key. It’s an output, and so it is not causally upstream of anything else, but it is evidently not necessary to play the game, so it stands in need of an explanation. And its modality (analog waveforms) is clearly unlike anything else in the machine. The narrator would be able to deduce the concept of “music” by noticing that the frequencies relate to each other by factors of 2^(1/12) that often seem to approximate small whole-number ratios like 3:2 and 5:4. From this it can conclude that the intended users of the machine have some sensory modality that directly perceives waves and does some kind of Fourier analysis of their frequencies, and which is likely distinct from the modality by which the “screen” is perceived.
I don’t know where this gets you exactly, since periodic waveforms can have any number of physical explanations, but it seems a lot closer to the physical world than anything else here.
There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement here. Particularly the ending. The protagonist misses the crucial point that if the civilization it has modelled can’t possibly contain it, there must be some trickery afoot. IMO most likely some future civilization (maybe the same society that made the NES further down the road?) which is intentionally running an experiment.
I disagree here. A Conway’s Game of Life civilization would be very unlikely to create Mario. Mario has 2D glyphs (writing) which would be very unnatural for a species which has evolved in a 2D environment to consume. It would be like humans developing a 3D writing system. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Mario has gravity (or a constant force which represents gravity to beings which evolved in such an environment). Mario uses a non-binary color space. Most of the living entities in Mario are bipedal. None of these things are impossible for a Conway’s Game of Life civilization to create, but it is more likely for our civilization to make them.
Unfortunately, I am not superintelligent, so I can’t say for sure whether or not the logical jumps here are possible. There are thousands of bits of information latent in the design of the game, though, and I find it hard to believe a sufficiently powerful intelligence wouldn’t be able to make something from it.
I think analyzing the “Signal” is the key. It’s an output, and so it is not causally upstream of anything else, but it is evidently not necessary to play the game, so it stands in need of an explanation. And its modality (analog waveforms) is clearly unlike anything else in the machine. The narrator would be able to deduce the concept of “music” by noticing that the frequencies relate to each other by factors of 2^(1/12) that often seem to approximate small whole-number ratios like 3:2 and 5:4. From this it can conclude that the intended users of the machine have some sensory modality that directly perceives waves and does some kind of Fourier analysis of their frequencies, and which is likely distinct from the modality by which the “screen” is perceived.
I don’t know where this gets you exactly, since periodic waveforms can have any number of physical explanations, but it seems a lot closer to the physical world than anything else here.