I went walking at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz with my fellow logician-turned-computer-scientist friend Michael Beeson.
The waves were still pretty big from the storms earlier this week. I love that instant when a wave’s smooth flow breaks into chaotic non-linear unpredictable spray.
I used to see that in my CA wave simulations, when for certain values the simulation becomes unstable and spits out scuzz. But here, in the lovely real world, it’s not really scuzz, it’s a different regime of computation with its own set of orbits and attractors, a computation so gnarly as to lie beyond the comprehension of anyone but the Big Pig, and maybe even beyond his/er full understanding as well.
As I say in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, “My sense is that most complex physical processes are strongly unpredictable in the sense that they represent computations that can’t be run any faster at all. Think of surf hitting a rock and shooting a plume into the air. Those incredibly intricate little bumps and wiggles in the foam — no way will anyone ever be able to produce a detailed, accurate, long-term emulation of a wave by any means short of making a physical copy of the wave.”
Being physical is a big thing that AIs are lacking, you wave.
I already did a few corrections and revisions on the fictional passage I posted yesterday, by the way, but let it stand as is, a raw sample of the work in progress.
I’d been thinking of having my Big Pig Posse track down the Heritagist spammers hunched over PCs in a trailer park and gun them all down. I once read that most spammers and telemarketers are clustered in a single trailer park near Boca Raton, Florida, and I always like to imagine the Terminator showing up there to wreak hideous vengeance.
But Michael pointed out that people wouldn’t likely be using PCs after the Singularity, also that my heroes would lose the readers’ sympathy if they become hitmen.
So now I’m thinking maybe the Heritagists have enslaved some people and are using them as “devices” to pump out the spam. And the Pig Posse can liberate them.
Michael and I watched the surfers for awhile; I was proud that I actually knew one of them.
Mathematicians that we are, rather than surfing ourselves, we analyzed the mechanics of how surfing works. (a) You’re sliding down a hill of water that moves, and (b) Because you’re sliding, you have the ability to move the board to the left or right beneath your center of gravity (by steering it), also the board will have very little tendency to move backwards, with the upshot that it’s easier to balance on a moving board than on a still one.
I said one thing that made Michael laugh a lot: “Sitting in front of your computer and using a web browser — calling that surfing is like balancing a shared checkbook and saying you’re f*cking.”