State: The missing link?

A quick note on thoughts I have had recently regarding the difference between a living creature and a computer program. Namely, what are those differences?

If an artificial life, let's call it a program, terminates, is it correct to say that it is dead? When the program starts up, is it being born? In some sense, yes. But something has been missing. It has kept me from being convinced that a program could ever be considered life. I think that missing link is state.

When you go to bed at night, your conscious thought process stops, but your state, all of the acquired experiences and memories that make you unique, is saved. Upon waking, your state is restored so that what makes you "you" remains, and you go on as a single continuous flow of execution, or, consciousness.

Without state, we would be like a program that starts and stops. Too frequent and too simple to be thought of as a living being. I think that state is a large missing component that is required if we ever want to reach a point where we're comfortable thinking that a computer program is a living being. It is easy to terminate a program without thinking that we should consult our morality, but it would be different to terminate a long running program that has acquired many years of experience and all the complexity that has lead to its current state.

We may think a little harder about the consequences, about what may be lost.

Comments

Water Pea Care and Instructions

Please treat your water pea like a real pet fish. Feed daily! Click here to get the Water Pea android app. You will receive a single water pea egg. Drop the egg in the water and your baby pea will hatch. If your water pea is alive after 1 da y, it will produce an egg that you can harvest . Care and Instructions Birth When you place the water pea egg in water, it will take a few seconds for the egg to dissolve. Initially, the newborn water pea will be tiny and hard to see. Take care not to accidentally pick it up and drop it out of the tank. Water peas live for about 3 days if properly fed. Feeding Your water pea must be fed every day, or it will die. To be safe, feed it once in the morning and again at night. Water peas recycle vitamin B by producing caecal pellets . Wait for your water pea to produce the pellet and then collect it so you don't run out of food. This is their only source of nutrition! To collect the pellets, drag them to the top of the ...

Momentum transfer

This image shows different possible paths that result in a collision. Intuitively, we know which way the object should continue along the wall. Determining this mathematically is a bit more challenging. The object could go in one of two directions. That is, it could follow the wall one way or the other. But why should it prefer one direction over another? We need a generalized rule that applies for every wall and every angle of approach. The rule is that momentum is transferred along the path of least resistance . Least resistance is the difference between the wall angle and the angle of approach that is less than 90 degrees. This raises the issue that a line's angle is determined by its direction. This means that the end point we start with determines the angle of the line. See the line below. Is it a 45 degree line, or a 225 degree line? It depends on which point you start from. But, for a generalized rule of momentum transfer, the answer shouldn't matter. ...

Collisions with line intersections

Collisions can be determined by testing for line intersections. Imagine a line representing the ground and an object above, falling down. At time t1 , take the center point p1 of the object. At time t2 , move the object down and take the center point p2 of the object. If the line formed by endpoints (p1, p2) intersect the ground line, a collision has occurred. On a collision, reset the object to its original position before the movement. When a collision occurs, be sure to reset the object by the same point used to determine the line intersection. In this example, I use the center point, so the object should be reset by the center point, not its actual x, y (usually top left) coordinate. It is not always the case that resetting by the x, y coordinate is sufficient. This can be seen in the following picture. It can be seen that even if the object isn't moving, but its size changes, a line intersection can occur, and resetting the object to its x, y position will...

Jelly Shack

Search This Blog