The EVM’s universe and the Universe

The notion that all (or in weaker sense, some) natural phenomena can be modelled as a computable process, some kind of algorithm is recently gaining scientific recognition, and more research is dedicated to the rigorous explorations of the mapping between natural phenomena and the formalised computational systems. There is some debate and controversy as to how much of the natural can be expressed in the models of the artificial, although due to formalised nature of mathematics and physics itself, it is generally accepted that computation is viable way to model physical reality. Contemporary developments in computer science and in physics not only do no refute computationalism – they provide more data and evidence in support of the basic theses. In this article we discuss some of the aspects of contemporary computationalist efforts based on the traditional notions of Turning Machine computation. Then we present an extended notion of computation, that goes beyond the traditional Turing limit. We propose a new interactive computation model called Evolvable Virtual Machines (EVMs). The EVM model uses the notion of many independently asynchronously executing processes, that communicate between each other and with the outside environment. We present some of the pitfalls of traditional computationalism, and compare it to our new, extended computationalist model, based on the notion of massively concurrent interactive computation (hypercomputation). We argue, that hypercomputationalism based on the collection of asynchronously concurrently communicating computational machines is a more compact and more appropriate way of representing natural phenomena (or the Universe in general). It is theoretically sound, and does not violate any of the current state-of-the-art physical theories. We discuss the details of our computational architecture, and present some of the implications of the hypercomputationalism on contemporary physical, life sciences, and computer science.UnpublishedScott Aaronson. Np-complete problems and physical reality. ACM SIGACT News, March 2005. http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0502072. David Bohm. Causality and chance in modern physics. Princeton, N.J., Van Nostrand, 1957. Foreword by Louis de Broglie. David Bohm. The Undivided Universe. Routledge, 1st edition, March 28 1995. ISBN: 041512185X. Selmer Bringsjord and Michael Zenzen. Superminds: People Harness Hypercomputation, and More. Studies in Cognitive Systems Volume 29. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Cen BF 311 B 4867. Vannevar Bush. As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush. Gregory J. Chaitin. Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega. Pantheon, October 4 2005. ISBN: 0375423133. Edward Fredkin. A new cosmogony: On the origin of the universe. In PhysComp’92: Proceedings of the Workshop on Physics and Computation. IEEE Press, 1992. Stephen J. Gould and Elizabeth Vrba. Exaptation – a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology, 8:4–15, 1982. Steve Grand. Creation: life and how to make it. Weiendfeld & Nicolson, London, Great Britain, 2000. Sci QH 324.2 GR12. John E. Hopcroft and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Introduction to automata theory, languages, and computation. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, USA, 1979. H.T.Siegelmann. Computation beyond the turing limit. Science, 268, 1995. Leonid A. Levin. Universal sequential search problems. Problems of Information Transmission, 9(3):265–266, 1973. Lynn Margulis. Origin of Eukaryotic Cel ls. University Press, New Haven, 1970. Lynn Margulis. Symbiosis in Cel l Evolution. Freeman & Co., San Francisco, 1981. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis: The organization of the living. In Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky, editors, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, volume 42 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrech, Holland, 1980. With a preface to ’Autopoiesis’ by Sir Stafford Beer. Originally published in Chile in 1972 under the title De maquinas y Seres Vivos, by Editorial Univesitaria S.A. Mariusz Nowostawski, Lucien Epiney, and Martin Purvis. Self-Adaptation and Dynamic Environment Experiments with Evolvable Virtual Machines. In S.Brueckner, G.Di Marzo Serugendo, D.Hales, and F.Zambonelli, editors, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Engineering SelfOrganizing Applications (ESOA 2005), pages 46–60. Springer Verlag, 2005. Mariusz Nowostawski, Martin Purvis, and Stephen Cranefield. An architecture for self-organising evolvable virtual machines. In Sven Brueckner, Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Anthony Karageorgos, and Radhika Nagpal, editors, Engineering Self Organising Sytems: Methodologies and Applications, number 3464 in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Springer Verlag, 2004. R.Gandy. The confluence of ideas in 1936. In R.Herken, editor, The Universal Turing Machine. A Half-Century Survey, pages 55–112. Oxford University Press, 1988. Juergen Schmidhuber. Optimal ordered problem solver. Machine Learning, 54:211–254, 2004. Karl Svozil. Computational universes. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 12May 2003. arXiv:physics/ 0305048 v1. Gerard ’t Hooft. Quantum gravity as a dissipative deterministic system. Class.Quant.Grav., 16:3263 – 3279, 1999. TechReport: THU-99/07. Gerard ’t Hooft. Quo Vadis Quantum Mechanics, The Frontiers Collection, chapter Determinism beneath Quantum Mechanics, pages 99 – 111. Springer, 2005. TechReport:quant-ph/0212095, ITP-UU-02/69, SPIN02/45. A. M. Turing. On computable numbers with an application to the entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42(2):230– 265, 1936–7. also 43, pp. 544-546, 1937. Alan Mathison Turing. Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals. PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1938. Stephen Wolfram. A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc., first edition, May 2002. Konrad Zuse. Rechnender raum. Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, 8:336– 344, 1967. ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/zuse67scan.pdf. Konrad Zuse. Calculating space. MIT Technical Translation AZT-70-164GEMIT, MIT (Pro ject MAC), Cambridge, MA, 1970. Original: Rechnender Raum, Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig, 1969