"computers will pop up that copy themselves" That is interesting idea. But do they pop up because the simulator provides the compute? Or because the simulator allows for the construction of structures that can compute?

I don't think you mean the first, as that is not too interesting to your goal. The latter is unlikely. How many possible configurations are there, and how many of those can compute? Let alone compute + copy? The universe will end before a random such entity appears.

Gravity causes matter to self organise into globes with disks. Charged molecules + surface tension causes crystallisation. Organic molecules support self-catylization.

From such organising principles there is a change self-copying arises before the universe ends. Or your EC2 budget ;)

Yes both. The sim provides the dynamics that allow for computers to exist. At a basic level, even simple phenomena are computations. RNA polymerase performs a computation when it copies. And we can go really low level, pretty much everything is a computation - of course, not all computations are equivalently great for life.

You are assuming this universe ends. In a type of heat death or singularity (choose your poison.) Not if gravity isn't part of the dynamics. And even then, the universe could be a cyclic one. [1]

Most likely EC2 is not the right approach. I have worked with Cuda and OpenCL and buying a bunch of beefy Teslas or the new Titans would be more cost effective.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

Every simulator of any kind can be described as "compute". The question is, can the simulated environment itself support a new level of compute? And if so, how independent is that compute?

Redstone in minecraft supports compute, but is not fully independent. That is, the "laws of physics" of minecraft include special rules for redstone.

RNA polymerase is fully independent, the "laws of physics" do not have special rules for RNA.

So that last thing is the interesting bit in your effort, correct?

Now you seem to hope that the second level compute comes about randomly. But for that to do anything before the end of time, the ration between:

  random states that compute / all possible random states

must be reasonable. And even then, one could argue that how those random states come about should be such that it is nothing special in the "laws of physics", or it is still "cheating".

What I am trying to point out, in our universe, the big bang was a shitload of energy in low entropy state. Due to gravity it started self organising. And due to many other self organising effects, we got to self copying ...

I am well aware. The simulation runs on a turing machine..a computer. That's different from turing completeness. Turing-completeness means a turing machine can be built inside of the simulation.

Fully independent? Nothing is fully independent of the universe it resides in.

Cheating doesnt mean much. Cheating is making AI from the top-down if thats the case. Because its the extreme opposite end of emergence. And plenty of work is being done on that now. So if you manage to get life by "cheating", fuck it. It's life. It's a milestone.

There's other ways to avoid total chaos besides gravity. There's just got to be a delicate balance of stability of structure yet the ability to destroy structure and extract potential in order to compute, ie make new structure.

Yes, it's an ambitious thing.. But its a question of whether life is a product of information and computation, or a product of more specific principles. Who really knows.

We are talking past each other because we are focused on slightly different things.

"Fully independent? Nothing is fully independent of the universe it resides in."

Indeed. But there are levels of independence. That is, do the laws of the simulation: 1) merely provide an environment in which there can be turing completeness. or 2) is some aspect of that turing completeness explicit in those laws. Again, redstone(2) vs RNA(1).

And in a similar vain, 3) is the world initialised with some low entropy state and merely lets that run. Or 4) is the simulator constantly randomly generating states?

If you can manage 1 and 3, that would be amazing. Anything less, might still be great, or nothing special. It will really depend on the exact nature of the simulation.

And I would wager that 1 and 3 can only be reached by simulating some sort of entropy flow that causes self-organisation + self-catalysation.

But maybe a much more compute rich universe as you seem to be planning (?) might work. You should surely try if you have ideas. My comments are by no means meant to discourage you!

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Note that from the perspective of entropy, there are 4 levels of organisation:

a) direct, the structure is the end result of high entropy (for gravity this is globes)

b) indrect, the structure is caused by the flow, but are not the end result (for gravity this is disks, but meandering rivers, crystals or organic molecules are other examples)

c) self-catalysation, (by lack of better term) like indirect, but the structure grows more than linear because more structure creates more structure[1]

d) self-copying, like self-catalysation, but in discrete space/time steps

Somewhere after (c) you would get self selection of the faster/better copiers ... which might lead to what falls squarely in a recognisable definition of life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_set

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"But its a question of whether life is a product of information and computation, or a product of more specific principles. Who really knows."

That is an interesting saying. What would be more specific principles? And maybe looking at life from the perspective of information and computation is not the most useful?

(That is why I said turing completeness is not so important to focus on, most simulations like we are talking about here are trivially turing complete.)

"Who really knows" :) our universe is surely 1 and 3, and life is at least 3 emergent system steps away from its most fundamental laws.

Thanks for that link. And the breakdown. I agree with everything you say here. You have a great handle on the task at hand. Perhaps you'd like to exchange ideas / collaborate? Can you shoot me an email at andy at scrollto.com ?