dvunkannon
Posts: 1377 Joined: June 2008
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Quote (Venus Mousetrap @ Oct. 01 2008,10:29) | Unsurprisingly, this has already been done. Kind of. I keep suggesting that the ID people should focus some research on cellular automata or similar, because a lot of what they are talking about HAS ALREADY BEEN DONE.
Chris Langton, in like the 1970s, noticed that cellular automata seemed to fall into one of four categories:
You had the empty ones which just fizzled out to nothing.
Then you had the ones which formed lots of regular patterns, but didn't do much else.
Then you had the ones which were so jumbled that they were just a chaotic mess.
And finally, you had the ones which were in between the last two, the 'complex' ones, which seemed like randomness but which coalesced into weird, amazing structures. The Game of Life which Davescot so seems to hate is one of these.
People not asleep at this point will notice that these near exactly correspond to Dembski's ideas of regularity, chance, and complexity, so much so that if they weren't all running a creationist scam over there, it'd probably have been mentioned.
But what's really neat is that Langton quantified the 'microstates' of these systems, if you like, with a simple number, which he called lambda. It's a dimensionless fraction, and I forget how it's defined, but it's something like the number of available states divided by the total number of possible states - a kind of measure of computational potential. And with this number, he could tell whereabouts a system was in terms of chaos, regularity, or complexity.
Personally I believe that the very existence of cellular automata like these blows the whole notion of ID out of the water, but still, if I were trying to pretend to be doing research, I would totally be playing around with CAs. |
This thread discusses lambda, and attributes the four way classification of CA to Wolfram, which I think is correct.
Prior to bannination, I made similar suggestions directly to the good DDrr.. on UD. If he wanted to show "What Evolution Can't Do", he should use GA to find the edge of evolution. However, MESA was apparently the local maxima of his research, and he can't weasel his way out of it.
-------------- I’m referring to evolution, not changes in allele frequencies. - Cornelius Hunter
I’m not an evolutionist, I’m a change in allele frequentist! - Nakashima
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