Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker are free to behave quite differently from each other, and each node has its own set of data, not all of which is necessarily shared with the other nodes. Summary of Chapter One Before moving on, I’d like to round off this chapter with a table to compare and contrast the traditional kinds of computation. p. 56
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Initial Input Interactive Input High- Level Rule Medium- Level Rule Low-Level Rule Lowest- Level Rule Helper Rules Underlying disciplines Human Reckoner Numbers, words and symbols on paper. Turing Machine Personal Computer The Web Symbols on the tape. Files. Names of networked machines. Extra problems. None. Keyboard and mouse. Requests to read and write data. A tax form or chain of math problems. May be read in. Person’s learned reckoning behavior. Algorithm for addition. Memorized plus and times tables. Ability to read and write. Psychology, biology, physics, logic. A rule coded up as symbols on tape, can be read by a universal Turing machine. A lookup table matching stimulus pairs to response triples. Standard run cycle: read, look-up response, write and move. Devices for reading, writing, and moving the head. How to read and writing symbols Physics, logic. Application software such as a word or image processor. May be read in. Operating system such as Windows or Linux Microcode on the chip. The system clock Chip architecture such as logic gates and adders. The BIOS code for reading and writing files. Electrical engineering, physics, logic. Browsers, email, Web crawlers. Applets, interactive Web pages, online data bases. Communications software to send and receive data. The software on the networked machines. Read and write methods. Communication theory, computer technology. Cellular Automaton Pattern of marked cells. Reaching in to change some cell values while the computation runs. The rule used by the individual cell processors. The run cycle which updates all the cells in synch. If implemented on a PC, the machine code that emulates the CA. If implemented on a PC, microcode and chip architecture. Graphics to display the CA. Depends on the implementation. Table 1.3: PCs, reckoners, Turing machines, and the Web. Finally, to summarize this chapter, here’s some of the key points I made. • A computation usually has multiple levels of rules, not all of them explicit. • It’s possible for two distinct computational processes to have equivalent behavior, but it may be that one is faster than another. • Although a computation may be theoretically possible to carry out, it can be practically unfeasible to do so. • The flow of many computations is in some sense unpredictable. • A legitimate computation may run endlessly without having to reach a conclusion. Joke about Von Karman Vortex Street As a sometime fiction writer, I like to think of Von Karman Vortex Street as a place, possibly located somewhere near Miles Davis’s Green Dolphin Street and the Firesign Theater’s Non-Euclid Avenue. p. 57
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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