Spontaneous emergence of a kind of digital life in a simulation

[AndyWalsh]

MOD NOTE: I asked Andy to create this new topic, but didn’t see the other one he made. Folding this is here, but it may be redundant now.

@Tim

SC, even if somebody could demonstrate that subtracting Kolmogorov Information from Shannon information had any real-world meaning (see Matthew Pocock’s comment in this post), we are left with something that doesn’t appear to have any utility beyond entertaining your friend Peter, and similar meaningless examples.

I finally had the chance to read the preprint mentioned in this thread:

Spontaneous emergence of a kind of digital life in a simulation

Saw this very interesting episode of Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, where he interviews Blaise Agüera on the emergence of replication and computation: [Mindscape 286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation] The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.19108 Much research on OoL and ALife focuses on the life period when self-replicators are already abundant. A central question during this period is: How do variation and complexity arise from simple self-replicators? Analyses often take the form of mathematical models and simulations [21]. In ALife, researchers often focus on selection for complex behaviors [22], which may include interactions with other agents [23]. Simulations may include tens of thousands of parameters and complex virtual ecosystems [24], but they can rarely modify the means of self-replication beyond adapting the mutation rate. The two most notable exceptions use assembly-like languages as computational substrate. In…

And wouldn’t you know it, they introduce a metric they call “high-order entropy” which is the difference of Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity (as estimated via compression and normalized by string length). They demonstrate that this measure is useful for detecting phase transitions between populations with numerous unique and mostly random programs and populations that are dominated by many copies/variants of a self-replicating program.

(And while we’re at it, we can tie in another recent thread and note that this is a scenario Assembly Theory is intended to address/detect: when the copy number of an entity far exceeds what is expected from combinatorics and input abundance alone, suggesting reproduction and/or selection is involved.)