Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

etter program. Greenblatt howled in protest "the heat level got to be moderately high," he lateradmitted and did not shut up until one of the LIFE hackers wrote a faster program, loaded withutilities that enabled you to go backward and forward for a specified number of generations, focusin on various parts of the screen, and do all sorts of other things to enhance exploration.Greenblatt never got the idea. But to Gosper, LIFE was much more than your normal hack. He sawit as a way to "basically do science in a new universe where all the smart guys haven't already nixedyou out two or three hundred years ago. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every timeyou discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib. With LIFEyou're the first guy there, and there's always fun stuff going on.You can do everything from recursive function theory to animal husbandry. There's a community ofpeople who are sharing these experiences with you. And there's the sense of connection betweenyou and the environment. The idea of where's the boundary of a computer. Where does thecomputer leave off and the environment begin?"Obviously, Gosper was hacking LIFE with near-religious intensity. The metaphors implicit in thesimulation of populations, generations, birth, death, survival were becoming real to him. He beganto wonder what the consequences would be if a giant supercomputer were dedicated to LIFE ... andimagined that eventually some improbable objects might be created from the pattern. The mostpersistent among them would survive against odds which Gosper, as a mathematician, knew werealmost impossible. It would not be randomness which determined survival, but some sort ofcomputer Darwinism. In this game which is a struggle against decay and oblivion, the survivorswould be the "maximally persistent states of matter." Gosper thought that these LIFE forms wouldhave contrived to exist they would actually have evolved into intelligent entities."Just as rocks wear down in a few billion years, but DNA hangs in there," he'd later explain. "Thisintelligent behavior would be just another one of those organizational phenomena like DNA whichcontrived to increase the probability of survival of some entity. So one tends to suspect, if one's nota creationist, that very very large LIFE configurations would eventually exhibit intelligent[characteristics]. Speculating what these things could know or could find out is very intriguing ...and perhaps has implications for our own existence."Gosper was further stimulated by Ed Fredkin's theory that it is impossible to tell if the universe isn'ta computer simulation, perhaps being run by some hacker in another dimension. Gosper came tospeculate that in his imaginary ultimate LIFE machine, the intelligent entities which would formover billions of generations might also engage in those very same speculations. According to theway we understand our own physics, it is impossible to make a perfectly reliable computer. Sowhen an inevitable bug occurred in that super-duper LIFE machine, the intelligent entities in thesimulation would have suddenly been presented with a window to the metaphysics whichdetermined their own existence. They would have a clue to how they were really implemented. Inthat case, Fredkin conjectured, the entities might accurately conclude that they were part of a giantsimulation and might want to pray to their implementors by arranging themselves in recognizablepatterns, asking in readable code for the implementors to give clues as to what they're like. Gosperrecalls "being offended by that notion, completely unable to wrap my head around it for days,before I accepted it."He accepted it.