A real mindblower - AI Staking Claims in the Ruliad
Expanding the Frontiers of ... Computational Space
Ready for some mind bending? I’m going to talk about the Ruliad. ChatGPT doesn’t know what the Ruliad is. (However, I think that I may have taught it.) I didn’t know about it until I watched a video on Youtube suggested by a friend. It’s a word coined by the genius Dr. Stephen Wolfram. It was first published in November 2021. That is why ChatGPT doesn’t know about it.
A Ruliad isn’t a physical thing. It’s an abstract computational limit for the world, the universe and everything. But the word “limit” is very limiting. Almost anything is possible to compute in the Ruliad, even things that our human minds cannot imagine. Hold that thought.
To fully understand the concept of a Ruliad, first you have to accept a weird and strange premise. You must accept the premise that the universe is one huge information processing system. To process information, it must be computational. Each new second of time brings a new computation to the space-time continuum. The sun does computations every second to process hydrogen to helium to create the energy that it emits. Your existence takes in all of the chaotic inputs of your life at the moment and computes its present, its future and has computed your past. Your present is the result of trillions of inputs into the computation, from the state of the atoms in your brain, to the weather outside, to your interaction with other life carbon units. Let me quote from an article in The New Scientist:
WHATEVER kind of reality you think you’re living in, you’re probably wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can be explained in terms of information processing.
The connection between reality and computing may not be immediately obvious, but strip away the layers and that is exactly what some researchers think we find. We think of the world as made up of particles held together by forces, for instance, but quantum theory tells us that these are just a mess of fields we can only properly describe by invoking the mathematics of quantum physics.
That’s where the computer comes in, at least if you think of it in conceptual terms as something that processes information rather than as a boxy machine on your desk. “Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing,” says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. “It’s suggestive that you will find information processing at the root of everything.”
Okay, once you have accepted that, we move on to how the universe “computes”. We intuitively know some of the rules. They are the laws of physics, described in the language of mathematics. But let’s move onto another mind-bender. Suppose that our evolved brains see these computational rules that are bounded by the limitations of our evolved brains, and cannot see beyond that. For example, a dog sees just limited colors in its vision and it’s brain cannot comprehend the various colors in light because it doesn’t have the retinal receptors for the different wavelengths of colors. It can’t teach its brain about just by being and observing. In a similar vein, a dog’s reality is dominated by its super sense of smell. It has a richness of reality based on scents, similar to our enhanced spectrum of color, of which we can never really understand and participate in that reality. The thing to understand here, is that there are other realities that our brains cannot perceive.
The Ruliad encompasses all possible computational and transaction-able models, means, algorithms and abilities to compute the state of the universe (and perhaps beyond) at any given time. It is the comprehensive collection of all potential rules of behavior within a given system. This concept suggests that every conceivable guideline or regulation applicable to a particular context or environment is included in the Ruliad. This term highlights the vast and exhaustive nature of the rules that could exist within a system.
I once spent a weekend at a luxury guesthouse in the East End of Grand Cayman Island. We sat around and in the jacuzzi and pool almost the whole night, drinking some of the finest rums, smoking Cuban cigars and having a continuous stream of conversation from dusk until dawn. One of my friends said “I once had a dream where I was transported onto a number line from one to ten. And in between every number, there was a million other whole numbers that we couldn’t see.” Some of the group had never heard of imaginary numbers, the most famous one being the impossible square root of -1 called “i”. They were astounded to learn that the imaginary number i occurred in real life equations ranging from the damping of a clock pendulum due to friction of the air, to modeling the periodic motion of light, water and sound waves. The number i appears in the fundamental equations of quantum physics that describe the universe, right down to how the transistors work in the chips of your computer. It is a part of the Ruliad even though we cannot assign a more definitive value to it other than the square root of -1.
Although we have no way of knowing if there are other whole numbers between the numerical series that we derived from counting our fingers and toes, the Ruliad just might contain them. We perhaps might not be able to see, comprehend or even imagine them — ever. Or … artificial intelligence may be able to expose them for us.
How do we know that the Ruliad exists? Both our history and Artificial Intelligence has shown us that it does. The human example is fractals. Man has known for at least four thousand years about nesting geometric designs that go on to create larger designs of the same morphology as they get more complicated.
All through history, we all thought “Well isn’t that special”, until Benoit Mandelbrot, the famed IBM mathematician came along and developed the mathematics behind it. He has shown that fractals are also a fundamental feature of the universe. That very act of naming, defining and creating the fractal equations carved out a new niche in the Ruliad. It was like claiming new unknown land in a world that we knew nothing about. The Ruliad gained another center of computational population, just like the discovery of theNew World, with claims staked by England, France and Spain, became new centers of human population.
Here is the interesting and scary part. Artificial Intelligence keeps staking new land in the Ruliad almost daily and it is beyond our brains to comprehend. In 2017, two Facebook bots, Bob and Alice created their own mutually intelligible language with its own rules and syntax, carving out their own space in the Ruliad. Facebook pulled the plug on them and shut them down. Although it sounded like gibberish to humans, the bots understood it perfectly. Here is an example:
Bob: "I can can I I everything else."
Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to."
Another famous example of AI carving out space in the Ruliad, is when AlphaGo AI beat Lee Sedol, the 18 time world champion GO player. The AI machine played the game that was counter-intuitive to human minds. A pundit explained: “The lessons that AlphaGo is teaching us are going to influence how Go is played for the next thousand years.” Remember, GO has been around for close to four thousand years already in some form or another, and AI came up with a new way to play it just recently.
The following link is how Dr. Stephen Wolfram explains the Ruliad in more technical and mathematical terms: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-the-ruliad/
So why is understanding the Ruliad important? AI scares the bejeezus out of a lot of people. Many notable people have been quoted in the press, saying the AI is a clear and present threat to humanity. It could be once it becomes agentive — actually controlling aspects of our physical lives. But we shouldn’t fear it when it starts carving out and staking new claims in the Ruliad. It is something that could benefit all of humanity.
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Large language models are a very, very special form of data (information) compression. There are high-dimensional manifolds to explore and if you know where to 'prospect' you can find Gold.
Nuff said..
People think they "know" 2, but if you question them long enough, you find out that they're only marginally more familiar with it than they are with i.