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March 28, 2024

Tag: universe

June 4, 2014

Let us become the nature

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The game, 2048, is an awesome game. Its simple but yet very addictive. Even after you know what strategy to apply. While I have been immersed in playing it for last one week or so, I came across this article in Hacker News about a javascript library developed to show Richard Dawkins’ Biomorph example to explain evolution. It made me think that even the game 2048 is a good example of this where 2 or 4 can be considered as basic biomorphs and the 16 blocks become the environment and then your actions of combining the blocks becomes the act of preferential choosing to lead the biomorphs into a certain evolutionary path, the concept of natural selection.
But just in its true sense with numbers, it is not very interesting as you can then easily predict the future children. You know that the exact path you need to take to reach a certain evolved child. Also the final result itself is fixed as you cannot change the criteria for natural selection in the game.
What if we could do that? What if instead of numbers, we had some biomorph similar to the one in the javascript implementation and we as the nature could decide the criteria of natural selection and what goes to next level. Ofcourse the number of blocks also have to be increased, may be the shape of the environment also changed.
It will be interesting to see how biomorphs would evolve overtime.
But this is still uninteresting. The killer feature would be if all the environments were connected to each other? Say in game 2048, once you reached 2048, you could combine with 15 other people who have reached that level and then each one of you combine to form a new environment where 1024/2048 is the numbers which keeps popping up on every move. This can be called as new evolved species in the new environment. Just instead of numbers it will be biomorphs. After the biomorphs have modified by certain factor in your environment, you get to combine with environments of others who have also reached that level and then continue playing with the higher species. Imagine how interesting it will be to see various developed biomorphs coming up on the internet thanks to the various criteria put up by people and their movements. I am thrilled with the idea.
Few fundamental questions that remain to be answered:
1) What kind of biomorphs can we use? Should the inital biomorph be of only one type? Can we just use elements in periodic table as the basic biomorph and then start combining them to form different molecules?
2) How do you calculate the amount of evolution to judge when to go to the next level?
3) What should be our environment and what should be the various actions in the environment?
4) When many environments combine, very soon the universe will be filled with environments which have very basic biomorphs to some which are very advance? Should these environments co-exist or can we just eliminate all basic environments as advance environments are formed.