Dev.SN

Can a Computer Fall in Love ?

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday March 01 2014, @08:30AM   
from the Call-me-once-you've-quantified-'love' dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Can a Computer Fall in Love if It Doesn't Have a Body? Much has been written about Spike Jonze's Her, the Oscar-nominated tale of love between man and operating system. It's an allegory about relationships in a digital age, a Rorschach test for technology. It's also premised on a particular vision of artificial intelligence as capable of experiencing love.

Poetic license aside, is that really possible ?"

• This is how I explain my iOS App Warp Life This is how I explain my iOS App Warp Life (Score: -1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 01 2014, @09:32AM

  by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) on Saturday March 01 2014, @09:32AM (#9097) Homepage

  • Warp Life [warplife.com]

  It is not yet in the App Store yet. It's almost done, but someone lifted my iPhone, I hocked my iPad when I was busted flat, and now I don't have the cash for the Apple Tax. However I just scored a real good contract, so development has already resume in the Simulator, with testing on real hardware resuming when I get my first check a little over a week from now.

  If you'd like to beta, send your UDID to mdcrawford@gmail.com [mailto] If you don't know how to fetch your iDevice's UDID, follow these instructions [warplife.com].

  So anyway...

  Few remember anymore that Conway's Game of Life [conwaylife.com] was originally developed by Princeton Mathematician John Horton Conway as an Artificial Intelligence Research Tool in 1970. Back then I used to play it on a checkerboard.

  Sometime around 1980, Conway proved that there is a Turing-Complete Computer somewhere in the Life Universe, but he didn't produce the actual computer. I don't have a clue how he managed to pull that one off. So sometime later, TWO DIFFERENT such computers were designed.

  So I tell those who are unfamiliar with computers, but who own iDevices, that someday, Warp Life will run on an iPad 42. It will fall into a purely artificial love with another instance of Warp Life, or Golly, or another of my competitors. It will court it's purely artificial heart's desire, their joyous friends, family and loved ones will join them to celebrate a purely artificial wedding, someday they will celebrate the birth of their very first purely artificial child.

  Perhaps, one day, Warp Life will worship a purely artificial G-d.

  For this to happen, we need research into the algorithms. That's what most folks at http://conwaylife.com/ [conwaylife.com] do. I can't fathom how they can come up with those amazing new patterns, what I prefer to refer to as "Animals".

  We also need bigger, faster computers, for example what the San Diego Supercomputer Center is doing. They recently - well a year or so ago - announced a new superbox that uses mostly Flash for memory, rather than dynamic RAM, so it uses far less power.

  And someone is going to need to make Life itself run much faster, however fast the speed of the box it's running on. That is my part, with Warp Life.

  I haven't compared them yet but Golly may be faster. However Golly does not run on the iPhone, just the iPad. Warp Life runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

  I agonized over what to charge for Warp Life in the App Store, at some point settling on $4.99. But no, in the end I decided there is a better way. It will be free, there will be a source code tarball included in the Application Bundle that you can transfer to your desktop with iTunes, and that code will have a Free Software license.

  (Not an Open Source license. Do you understand the difference?)

  --
  I have a major product announcement [warplife.com] coming 5:01 PM 2014-03-21 EST.

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• Re:This is how I explain my iOS App Warp Life (Score: 2) by SMI on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:08AM

  by SMI (333) on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:08AM (#9467)

  I don't think that this post is off topic.

  Parent