[FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

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But if we use the word "theory" in its minimal sense of "a language and a set of axioms", then your "to be copied so that it does the same thing" *is* a theory, albeit a different theory (or containing theory) for one that would treat the [un]copyable application over and above the act of copying. What would be interesting would be the *number* and diversity of theories validatable/executable against any given set of tokens.

On 11/30/20 3:33 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I spent a fair amount of my youth disassembling boot procedures of various copy protection schemes.   There one is given a list of numbers that bootstrap an operating system and an application.  A small portion of that list of numbers is relevant to preventing that list of numbers from being copied from one media to another.   It wasn’t really necessary to have a theory of the application, generally, to understand how to change the numbers to make that list copyable.   If one had no theory of a computer instruction set or of an operating system, but was just given a disk and the goal of copying it to get the computer to do the same thing when the copied disk was put in to the disk drive instead of the original disk, it is possible to learn everything that is needed to learn which numbers to change.   No oscilloscope needed, no theory of solid state physics, etc.  Ok, maybe one reference manual.   Biology is the same, but without a concise reference manual.
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> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> *Sent:* Monday, November 30, 2020 1:25 PM
> *To:* 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world
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> All,
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> I feel like this relates to a discussion held during Nerd Hour at the end of last Friday’s vfriam.  I was arguing  that given, say, a string of numbers, and no information external to that string, that no AI could detect “order” unless it already possessed a theory of what order is.  I found the discussion distressing because I thought the point was trivial but all the smart people in the conversation were arguing against me.

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