Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!gatech!swrinde!emory!mind.org!runic!thantos
From: thantos@runic.mind.org (Alexander Williams)
Subject: Re: ALife Park
Organization: Runic Writings UUCP Link: Convoco Hasturam
Message-ID: <D8Iyxw.4sG@runic.mind.org>
References: <3o61j0$cbp@ns.cityscape.co.uk> <3oe09l$dfd@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <D8DMxx.11r@runic.mind.org> <3ouc01$7jo@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 13 May 1995 16:25:01 GMT
Lines: 47

In an arcane scroll, Alexander Williams quotes the holy scripturist
Pixelated!, replying to the mystic words as written, saying:

>Again, interesting analogy.  I think the important thing to remember here

   Too much living in the South, I fear.  Besides, ALife /needs/
some colourful speakers.  Eccentrics, too.

>is that as others've said is that the istruction set of the Tierran soup
>is so different than any other, that the kinds of mutatios necessary to
>make a valid program for *any* other computer are astronomically unlikely.

   Precisely, and not just would it have to mutate an entirely new
instruction set but it'd have to evolve an entirely new
/architecture/.  Since neither of those are mutable in the first
place, its moot.

>Incidentally, I'm curious as to who thought up that template-based
>addressing...:) Back to my point:  for a viable program, you'd have to

   I almost wish there was a real architecture that used that
technique; my intuition tells me it'd be an interesting platform to
develop Lisp applications on.

>What, the dork chaoticist didn't clue you in? :)  I was yelling at the
>screen, going "what kind of idiot *are* you??!?" :) :)

   Chaos Theory my left ventricle...  Pah.  :)

>I wonder:  has anyone tried a scaled-down version of net.Tierra?  Say,
>four-to-twenty machines on an isolated LAN, just to see what'd happen.  Until
>you run *some* kkind of test, you don't know what to expect, but it might be
>interesting for a "dry run."

   I'm absolutely certain that before the code hits the ftp site,
it'll be tried out in just such a manner.  I'm just a bit sniffly
over the fact Email exchange won't be implimented for some time.  :)

>I missed this.  Where can I find info about it?

   It was just reposted to rec.humour.funny (moderated) a week or so
ago.
-- 
thantos@runic.mind.org (Alexander Williams)     | PGP 2.6 key avail
  Should we shed our mental pants and compare   | DF 22 16 CE CA 7F
  the size of our consciousnesses?              | 98 47 13 EE 8E EC
      Jan Sand to Marvin Minsky                 | 9C 2D 9B 9B
