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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?
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!
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.
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...
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.
http://xkcd.com/224/
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.