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Researcher Writes A Machine Language For The Universe (typepad.com)
Slashdot reader smugfunt shares a blog post from systems scientist George Mobus:
"There is a fundamental language of systems that provides a way to describe both structures and functions that is universal across any kind of system... I am nearing completion of the basic specification of the language and will be presenting my results at the next ISSS conference in Boulder CO this July... This language, which I formally call SL, but privately call "systemese", is like the machine language of the universe. Any system you choose to analyze and model can be described in this language...!
The beauty of the approach is that the end product of analysis is a compilable program that is the model of the system. The language does not just cover dynamics (e.g. system dynamics), or agents (agent-based), or evolutionary (e.g., genetic algorithms) models. It incorporates all of the above plus real adaptivity and learning (e.g. biological-like), and real evolvability (as when species or corporations evolve in complex non-stationary environments)... Systemese and mentalese (the language of thought), a concept advanced by philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, are basically one in the same! That is, our brains, at a subconscious level, use systemese to construct our models of how the world works.
The beauty of the approach is that the end product of analysis is a compilable program that is the model of the system. The language does not just cover dynamics (e.g. system dynamics), or agents (agent-based), or evolutionary (e.g., genetic algorithms) models. It incorporates all of the above plus real adaptivity and learning (e.g. biological-like), and real evolvability (as when species or corporations evolve in complex non-stationary environments)... Systemese and mentalese (the language of thought), a concept advanced by philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, are basically one in the same! That is, our brains, at a subconscious level, use systemese to construct our models of how the world works.
My BS sense is tingling!
I call it "Physics".
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
General Systems Theory was bullshit 50 years ago and it hasn't changed since.
Really? How about non-computational mathematics.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Your language is inconsistent.
In summary, buy my book for more bullshit.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Actually I think they're calling it "Bi-polar" these days.
So this guy just invented a language that we already use "at a subconscious level"? How practical that there's no looking into the subconscious mind, so what it does is up to anybody's imagination. Can't he also invent Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" that we supposedly use at a subconscious level, but that nobody has ever been able to describe?
Too bad article is so light on details of implementation. Also, diagrams look abit like lurianic kabbalah or gurdjieff's enneagram... drawn in mspaint. Which is not a good sign, lol
Did I miss the paper, or is the blog post everything there is? I remember the good old days when crackpot scientists at least went through the trouble of producing a scientific looking paper in LaTeX with lots of formulas and graphs.
You only have to look as far as quantum physics to see how non universal this language is. The moment you make something "universal" is the moment your universe gets redefined.
Turing already did this back in 1936. It's called a "Turing Machine". See his essay on computable numbers: http://www.dna.caltech.edu/cou...
We are looking for an entry level person with an Engineering, CS, Math or natural science degree with at least 2 years of SL programming, MS SQL, Java, Javascript, C/C++/C#, Oracle, DB2, Linux, Windows, OS X, AS400, AIX, RPG, COBOL, assembly: x86, 68000, PowerPC, IBM360, DEC.
You must be passionate about your work.
We are a dynamic fast paced organization.
H1-bs Prefer....welcomed.
Is this not, then, Mathematica?
https://reference.wolfram.com/...
Use Dirac notation as extended for big data by Robson in "The New Physician as Unwitting Quantum Mechanic: Is Adapting Dirac’s Inference System Best Practice for Personalized Medicine, Genomics, and Proteomics".
This "notation" actually emphasizes certain primitive operations that can define the "machine language". Syntactic sugars should be used for parsimony, as well as and pragmas for efficient semantic heuristics are appropriate layers atop the primitives.
Seastead this.
That's nice, honey, you work on your universal language.
Watch: This language will be a piss poor re-implementation of Common Lisp.
systemdese
Off to jail with you!
The claims about so-called 'mentalese' and Fodor here are pretty transparently bogus. Why is it that people so often like to talk about philosophy, which they clearly do not understand? So, this is yet another case of 'nothing to see here, please move along'.
...you illiterate, language-wrecking America cretins.
. . . says "amateur".
Better catch him before he makes it to the Well World's interior and performs a full Reset of the Universe.
..on second thought, let's help him instead, I think the Universe could use a Reset.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Riiight.
hopefully the compiler ain't written in php
The computational universe
http://xkcd.com/224/
Partly in Python, except for the older section which is in C++ and Perl which was then compiled and linked to jar files. Since they couldn't afford real programmers they then had grad students use .Net to set up a website running on IIS and written in VB. Just copy and paste your statement into a form and press "compile".
So it was all pretty straight forward.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Without a working and verified Grand Unifying Theory (GUT) in Physics, this cannot be done. And we are probably farther removed from achieving that than ever. This is, as presented, nothing but a scam, masking as Science.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For the past couple of months I've been idly trying to deduce how the universe works from the point of view of a computable machine. (It's sort of a relaxing hobby I use to cleanse my mental palette from the day job.)
Basically, assume that the universe is computable. This means that all information must be represented by a *finite* amount of information - position, probability, and so on. Computability in this sense means that any operation must complete in a finite amount of time(*).
This implies that space must be quantized, because having infinite precision in position requires an infinitely long floating point number, which would be uncomputable. So far so good.
A quantized space is roughly analogous to binary B/W images, and in order to prevent "jaggies" we have Bresenham's algorithm and anti-aliasing.
So the wave nature of particles seems like the universe's answer to anti-aliasing: you have the probability of particle position be in multiple places at once depending on it's movement, and you choose one when you do an interaction. The "position" of a particle is held as a sum of waves, and this can be represented as a bit field, where each "1" in the field indicates that the wave of that frequency is part of the position, and "0" says that the frequency is not(**).
The advantage is that you can calculate a sin wave to arbitrary precision depending on your needs. If you want a particle position in order to do an interaction, you start rolling binary dice bit-by-bit until you get a "1" on your dice. Each time you roll a "0", you calculate the position to finer and finer levels of detail. When you roll a "1", that sets the position of the particle and you then do the interaction.
The problem with all this is that a complete description gets wildly complex. Each pair of entangled photons has a link to the other, so that if you collapse the waveform on one you have to collapse the other as well.
When a photon hits a semi-silvered mirror, the path becomes *two* paths that have to be added together. When it encounters a regular mirror, the sin() and cos() terms are swapped.
When you get to the point of interaction, you have to add together for *all* possible paths the photon could have taken, including all the non-straight lines, and blocked direct paths.
This is wildly complex, and defies conventional representation! What data structure is needed to keep track of all these paths?
(As a thought problem, consider a photon emitted from a galaxy. An ever-expanding sphere of probability extends from the point of origin, with pieces of the sphere interacting with everything it encounters, said pieces can be reflected or bent or modified in various ways, and this goes on for billions of years. When it reaches a point of interaction, all these myriad pieces get added together to make the probability that the photon appears at the interaction point. And yet, we encounter photons from distant galaxies all the time.)
If someone has sorted this out and created a truly universal representation of the universe, it would be a landmark paper and sit alongside Einstein's discovery of relativity and QM, and Newton's discovery of gravitation and integration.
(*) With one-and-only-one *possible* exception being the entire program. Individual interactions must be resolved in a finite time, but the total universe is allowed to go on forever.
(**) A little more complicated than this, because the amplitudes can be +1/0/-1, and there's sin() and cos() components, but I don't want to cloud the description with details.
can it decide if any simulation written in this language terminate in a finite time?
Does it involve an intricate mesh of nested brackets, braces and parenthesis?
Mandatory tabbing and trailing semicolons?
Conditions expressed by single punctuation makrs, which are reversed if the character appears twice?
Variables, commands and functions chained together with periods?
Does it support oodles of ways to disguise and execute destructive code?
Am I going to have to repeatedly insist to my boss that just because I can replace a blown PSU that I'm not his man to code the website?
One could form an automata from the patterns of virtual particle interactions in the vacuum, however that is still going to be a virtual machine running an arbitrary language and not something running on the "bare metal" (or strings) of the universe and according to the fundamental rules that govern string interactions.
When we see claims such as those made by George Mobus we need to consider if they are nothing more than a symptom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's already been invented
Universal opcodes
Stephen wrote a grand proposal to compute physics with cellular automata. It builds on Von Neumans early work 70 years ago. Stephen never showed any really deep physics in this book, but says its coming.
I do not think it means what you think it means. (with apologies for the plagarism to Inigo Montoya)
Machine language is the raw ones and zeroes upon which a machine actually operates. Assembly code is the 1-to-1 mapping of human-readable/writeable mnemonics to machine code. Very few people write machine code, as there's no advantage to working in ones and zeroes when assembly code exists.
Given that the universe probably HAS no machine code (if it DID it would have a designer...) it's highly unlikely that this clown has discovered its machine code, but even if it had and he had then he should have written an assembly language. He has instead invented his own pseudo-language that [1] is NOT a "machine code" and [2] has nothing to do with the underlying mechanisms for how the universe actually operates, and for which [3] there is no reason to create an assembly language. Therefore: the article is BUNK and the idiot is just trolling for an academic reputation and research funding, perhaps including employment in academia.
Systems, systems, systems! Um, what? This doesn't look very informative.
I tried reading the article; it was pretty long and dense while failing to provide a tl';dr. Is he saying he's created yet another language that is Turing Equivalent? Is he saying he has creaeted a language that simulates physics by simulating fundamental behaviors? What is the accomplishment here?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
The machine code of a computer is directly and inextricably tied to the underlying mechanism; it's not some arbitrary abstraction or some projection of how some dude THINKS the computer MIGHT work.
You say that the ones and zeroes "do exist,but not in the sense that they do on computers", by which you are either stating your [unproven] BELIEF that there is something like an automation system at work to which a language could be actually mapped, or that whatever mechanisms are at work can be thought of as an analog of a similar sort of mechanism which can then be represented by a language as an intellectual exercise. In either event, since it's NOT directly tied to the most-basic operating methods of the universe, it's very much NOT equivalent to "machine code". One light as well say he has discovered the Latin language of the universe.
Sorry, but the guy who thinks he has a "machine code" for the universe might well be some sort of marketing genius (though I doubt it given how un-sexy in a marketing sense "machine code" is) but he most certainly is not an actual genius. I doubt he's up to coding Asteroids for an arcade machine to say nothing of hacking the universe.
Like "a new kind of physics", complex drivel
How does this relate to Turing machines and Grand Unified Theories in physics? The former is well understood, solid theory in computer science. The latter is an unachieved goal of physics. Like many others here, my BS meter is in action; but I've got an open mind.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The open-source compiler for this new language is called Hokum and the free IDE is called Bunkum.
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
A long, text-only blog entry with merely "claims" that "I have done this amazing thing", is stupid.
How did this garbage make the Main Page?
Shall I write a FaceBook Post on the perpetual-motion machine that I invented, and built, but refuse to show anyone because they might steal my ideas? It would hold more water than this guy's incomprehensible gobbledygook.
Many comments here take the "machine language" way too literally. That term should not have been part of the OP on a board that caters to so many "shoot from the hip" programmers.
This is more about layers of meta language and procedures and principles than about some lowest level physics language. The "lowest level language that the universe runs on" would require complete understanding of the universe.
This system allow for our current knowledge to be at best incomplete. Imagine if this system were complete, but we only knew Newton, and then along came Einstein and showed that Newton was just a reasonable approximation. And then came quantum physics. We still don't know what runs at the lowest level, and it may not even be provable a la Gödel. This system has room for all of these and simply tries to describe each as an organization of primitives.
So Dr. Morbius, why should we not regard you as a full-on crank?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ql_1
The language is made of cat emoticons, some semi-transparent.
Table-ized A.I.
In LISP....with a couple of PERL scripts to tie it all together.
in their theoretical expressive power to describe any computable function. See Turing-Equivalent
At least, all deterministic programming languages.
Languages vary mostly in how compressed and/or comprehensible it is to express this versus that type of operation or type of datatype.
I guess a machine-language for the universe would have to be expressive enough to take advantage of everything a quantum computer could do, whatever that set of capabilities actually is.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?