By: Shankar

Shankar — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 19:56:00 +0000

Pretty interesting quote from Chaitin:I’m trinyg to create a new field, and I’d like to invite you all to leap in, join [me] if you feel like it. I think we have a remarkable opportunity to create a kind of a theoretical mathematical biology So let me tell you a little bit about this viewpoint of biology which I think may enable us to create a new mathematical version of Darwin’s theory, maybe even prove that evolution works for the skeptics who don’t believe it I don’t want evolution to stagnate, because as a pure mathematician, if the system evolves and it stops evolving, that’s like it never evolved at all I want to prove that evolution can go on forever OK, so software is everywhere there, and what I want to do is make a theory about randomly evolving, mutating and evolving software a little toy model of evolution where I can prove theorems, because I love Darwin’s theory, I have nothing against it, but, you know, it’s just an empirical theory. As a pure mathematician, that’s not good enough John Maynard Smith is saying that we define life as something that evolves according to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now this may seem that it’s totally circular reasoning, but it’s not. It’s not that kind of reasoning, because the whole point, as a pure mathematician, is to prove that there is something in the world of pure math that satisfies this definition you know, to invent a mathematical life-form in the Pythagorean world that I can prove actually does evolve according to Darwin’s theory, and to prove that there is something which satisfies this definition of being alive. And that will be at least a proof that in some toy model, Darwin’s theory of evolution works which I regard as the first step in developing this as a theory, this viewpoint of life as evolving software . I want to know what is the simplest thing I need mathematically to show that evolution by natural selection works on it? You see, so this will be the simplest possible life form that I can come up with .

Comments on: Happy Birthday Mary!

By: Shankar